In November last year (2012) I had a week off work and with no particular plans, I felt the urge to go somewhere “random”. I don’t imagine this is an unusual thing to want to do but often the “random” place is picked in a very non-random way, for example, somewhere:

• You have visited before.
• That has been suggested by friends, family or acquittance.
• Has subconsciously slipped into your mind at some point.

I wanted to go to a proper rand() location that wouldn’t be influenced by anything.However I did set a few parameters. The location had to be

• Reachable on a day trip from Edinburgh
• Somewhere without criminal trespass laws e.g: Airport, Ministry of Defense land, Prisons etc.
• On dry land

And that was it….

Fortunately I wasn’t the first person to want to do this so the Internet already had a solution in the form of Random Point Generator. I decided that I would use 10 mile radius from George Square in Glasgow. Yes, this is way more specific that my rules above but there is a limit of the amount of randomness one can have!

The random point generator spat out:

Latitude: 55.801459
Longitude: -4.35821

Located within walking distance of Nitshill station it looked like a interesting place to visit. I checked the train times and did a bit of research discovering that Nitshill was known for a mining disaster in 1851 and is home to Glasgow Museums Resource Centre.

It was the morning of my journey. I arrived at Waverly station later than planned but still at a respectable time. The weather going across to Glasgow was pretty grey and I didn’t have high hopes for dodging rain showers. After a quick walk through Glasgow city centre I got on the train to Nitshill. The rain was lashing down as the train pulled out of the station leaving me to my wet fate.

The train disappearing into the distance.

I took out my Android phone and fired up c:geo, after a few minutes I got a GPS fix only for the phone to reboot. I revered to using the seemingly more robust (but slow) Google maps app and make way toward my destination. I successfully navigated some “localised flooding” with creative climbing along a fence previously used to discourage pilferage from the now abandoned shops.

“Localised Flooding”

After a slight detour along a road to nowhere, I wandered through a modern hosing estate and out onto a footpath. I was getting quite close to my destination so I left the path and picked a okay looking route through brables, gorse and over a barbed wired fence. I was close enough to my destination that I stopped walking.

I stood still, closed my eyes and listened to the stream flowing and birds singing. The sky was almost completely blue, the rain clouds had migrated and the sun was dropping low in the sky. I would have loved to stay there for another half hour to watch the sun set but I needed to catch my train to make the last off peak Edinburgh bound train before the evening rush.

I shed a few tears and made my way to the train station for the homeward journey.

More photos documenting my journey

PS: I had my second phone recording GPS coordinates for most of the day. I’ll download the data and maybe try to visualise it at some point.