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OWL Tour 2010 – Day 4: The last day of this weekend tour we had reserved for the LWL-Open-Air Museum in Detmold. It is Germany’s biggest open-air museum and offers 90 hectares of landscape and more than 100 historical buildings and gardens to be discovered.

We arrived early in the morning and as it was a Sunday that was good, because a little bit later the parking ground was completely full. The museum gives a detailed and fascinating overview of the development and changes of Westphalian everyday life and cultural history.

The museum is very large and has a lot to see, so bring enough time and if you want to save money, bring your own food and something to drink for a great day at the museum.

After visiting the LWL-Open-Air Museum in Detmold we drove back home. Originally we wanted to stop again in Bielefeld on the way back to Holland, but it was getting late and we had seen and done enough already for this time. We’ll be back.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 4: The night we spent in Horn-Bad Meinberg on a spacious and quiet camper park with service station next to the Länderwaldpark Silvaticum.

Bad Meinberg is a spa town with two mineral springs, a historical Kurpark and many health and wellness related offers. The center of town is within walking distance of the camper park.

We liked it here but as the weekend was coming to an end, we had to get going and luckily the day started with a blue sky.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 3: After visiting the paper mill museum there was still a bit of time before going to the camper park in the evening. As we wanted to spend the night in Bad Meinberg, it was just a small detour to visit the Extersteine. The Extersteine are five huge sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest.

The Exterseine have been modified and decorated by humans over the centuries and were a place for pagan rituals prior to the arrival of Christianity in this region. Access to the Extersteine is free, but during the day one has to pay for parking and climbing up the pillars.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 3: At 3 pm it was finally time to visit the old paper mill in Schieder. The water powered mill has been used by the Plöger family to create paper from about 1703 until 1989.

In 2001 the renovated building was opened to the public as museum and since a guided tour shows us how paper and cardboard have been produced over the past 300 years. We found the tour to be very interesting. It was amazing to see how much work it takes to create a simple sheet of paper.

The Papiermühle Plöger is open to the public from May until the end of October on Saturdays (3pm – 5pm) and Sundays (10am – 12 am and 3pm – 5pm) only. When we visited, parking our motorhome was not easy, but since then the museum got its own parking space, so that shouldn’t be an issue any longer.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 3: We returned to Schieder and as there was still enough time, we stopped at the castle of Schieder (1703-1706) and walked a bit through the park which is open to the public. Until 1918 the castle was the summer residence of the House of Lippe.

In 2008 the baroque garden in front of the castle has been recreated and from the castle an English landscape park of 17ha with many old trees goes all the way to the banks of Schieder lake (Schiedersee).

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 3: As the paper-mill museum in Schieder-Schwalenberg doesn’t open before 15:00 on Saturdays, we had the morning the see the area. Schwalenberg was supposed to be a picturesque village and nearby in Lother was a real-estate we were interested in and wanted to see. So we started a short tour through the beautiful Lippe Uplands (German: Lipper Bergland).

After we had seen the old farm house in Lothe and went shopping in Steinheim we went for a walk through the old center of Schwalenberg. From driving through the village before we didn’t expect what we were about to see. As soon as you turn around the corner of the main street and enter the old part of town, the streets are lined up with old traditional truss houses from the 16th and 17th century. It almost felt like entering an open-air museum.

Usually such picturesque villages are being flooded with tourists and souvenir shops, but luckily that wasn’t the case with Schwalenberg.