The New England Gateway to Franconia
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This cache is easy to find, but hard to understand. It's about spacetime, wormholes and some terms you might have heard as a reader of the Da Vinci Code. It will give you some insight into European history and you will learn where the name of Franconia comes from. Trackable items disappear there and reappear on a different continent!
"Spacetime"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines space and time into a single construct called the space-time continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted as a four-dimensional object with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of the 4th dimension. According to Euclidean space perception, our universe has three dimensions of space, and one dimension of time. (...) In classical mechanics, the use of spacetime over Euclidean space is optional, as time is independent of mechanical motion in three dimensions. In relativistic contexts, however, time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space as it depends on an object's velocity relative to the speed of light.
While spacetime can be viewed as a consequence of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, it was first explicitly proposed by one of his teachers, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, in a 1908 essay [1] building on and extending Einstein's work. His concept of Minkowski space is the earliest treatment of space and time as two aspects of a unified whole, the essence of special relativity. The idea of Minkowski space also led to special relativity being viewed in a more geometrical way, this geometric viewpoint of spacetime being important in general relativity too.
The New England Gateway to Franconia Cache is in a location where the space-time continuum has a distortion. This distortion - also referred to as a wormhole - causes the very strange effect that a certain species of bugs (aka Travel Bug) tends to suddenly disappear from that cache and reappears approximately 010E 50N in Franconia, the namesake of Franconia, NH (AZ, MN, PA, VA).
"Franconia"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Franconia (German: Franken) is a historic region in modern Germany, which today forms three administrative regions of the German federal state of Bavaria: Lower Franconia (Unterfranken), Middle Franconia (Mittelfranken), and Upper Franconia (Oberfranken).
Though its area has shifted, Franconia was one of the five original stem duchies that eventually made up the Holy Roman Empire. Franconia, east of the Rhine river (with the cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms on the west bank), was part of the Eastern Frankish kingdom, Austrasia.
Most Travel Bugs dropped in The New England Gate to Franconia reappear in Middle Franconia in a corresponding Cache called "Das Fraenkische Tor nach Neuengland", located in the City of Nuremberg, the city of The Diet of Nuremberg which defined in the Golden Bull of 1356, for a period of more than four hundred years, the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Nuremberg is now the main city in Franconia and is also known as the place of the Nuremberg Trials. Franks take the Travel Bugs from that cache and bring them to places all over Europe!
"Franks"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Originally, the confederation of the Franks was formed out of Germanic tribes: Salians, Sicambri, Chamavi, Tencteri, Chattuarii, Bructeri, Usipetes, Ampsivarii, Chatti.
They entered the late Roman Empire from the east river bank of the Rhine into northern Belgium or Flanders and modern southern Holland, where they were accepted as a foederati (AD 358). Later they conquered and established a lasting realm (sometimes referred to as Francia) in an area which eventually covered most of modern-day France, the Low Countries, and the western regions of Germany (Franconia, Rhineland, Hesse), forming the historic kernel of all these modern countries.
The conversion to Christianity of the pagan Frankish king Clovis in the late 5th century was a crucial event in the history of Europe. Clovis is considered the founder both of France (which his state closely resembled geographically at his death) and the Merovingian dynasty which ruled the Franks for the next two centuries. Today regarded as the founding father of both France and Germany and sometimes as the Father of Europe, as he was the first ruler of a Western Europe empire since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Merovingian Dynasty was succeeded by the Carolingians. The name Carolingian itself comes from Charlemagne, or Charles the Great (in Latin, Carolus Magnus), he was the King of the Franks (768–814) who conquered Italy and took the Iron Crown of Lombardy in 774 and, on a visit to Rome in 800, was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, presaging the revival of the Roman imperial tradition in the West in the form of the Holy Roman Empire. By his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define Western Europe and the Middle Ages. His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of the arts and education in the West.
At it's post-Carolingian peak, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed the territories of present-day Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Belgium, and the Netherlands as well as large parts of modern Poland, France, Italy and some parts of Spain. At the time of its dissolution more than 1000 years later in 1806, it consisted of its core German territories and smaller parts of France, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Decide now to give your Travel Bug an international flair - make it's mission travelling to The New England Gateway To Franconia! Let it disappear in the wormhole ending in "Das Fraenkische Tor nach Neuengland"!
It's an easy park-and-grab, right beside the paved road. Please keep in mind: Trackable items should not be retrieved, otherwise they can't find their way to Franconia.
Enjoy!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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