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OWL Tour 2010 – Day 2: Our last destination on our second day of this tour before going to the camper park was the Umweltzentrum Heerser Mühle in Bad Salzuflen, a non-profit institution for environmental education.

The former sawmill (mentioned first in 1358) and 37 ha land have been turned into a center for nature and environmental education with seminar rooms, kitchens, a workshop, a small cafe, theme and school gardens. We went to see the various gardens as we are thinking of creating a public garden ourselves one day.

Most of the gardens are located on the island between the millrace and the Werre river. The Umweltzentrum Heerser Mühle is open to the public between 7am and 8pm, free of charge.

Even though there is a camper park in Bad Salzuflen, which would give us a chance to see this spa town, we picked a camper park further away in Schieder, where we wanted to visit a paper mill museum.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 2: Bielefeld certainly has more to offer than these two gardens but since it is on the route to and from Holland, we’ll be back for more. From Bielefeld it is a 30 minute drive to the brickworks museum in Lage, a small town in the Lippe district. The brickworks museum is one of the 8 museum locations of the Westphalian State Museum of Industrial Heritage.

The museum shows how bricks have been made throughout history. It was impressive to see how much work and energy it takes to create this common building material. Every first Sunday of a month one can enjoy a ride on a small railway (Feldbahn) that travels a route around the former clay-pit of the Beermann brickworks and on some days visitors are invited to turn clay into bricks by hand themselves.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 2: In the morning we got up early and were back on the road while most other people were still sleeping in their motorhomes. We wanted to visit two gardens in Bielefeld and one in Bad Salzuflen to get some ideas for our own public garden which we are planning.

When you drive through Bielefeld you don’t really think of gardens, but Bielefeld is not only situated beautifully in the Teutoburg Forest nature park, it also has some gardens which are worth a visit. To start with we went to the botanical garden. The botanical garden of Bielefeld is a municipal botanical garden of 4 hectares located on the hillside of the Kahler Berg near the town center and is open to the public for free.

The garden offers an extensive plant collections and a wide variety of landscaped gardens. Highlights are the traditional Westphalian farmhouse from the year 1823, the rhododendron and azalea displays, and the presentation of different natural settings such as rock gardens, alpine beds, medicinal and herb plantings, heather gardens and beech wood flora.

Next we went to the Japanese Garden, which was opened 2003. The Japanese garden in Bielefeld-Bethel is a traditional Japanese rock garden according to ‘Kare san sui’ principles.

Visitors experience the garden with their eyes only, they do not walk through this idealized representation of the natural world. Next to a series of photos we also created a short video of this special garden.

Japanese Garden Bielefeld from Harald Walker on Vimeo.

OWL Tour 2010 – Day 1: In the middle of July we wanted to go back and visit the Lippe region again, including Ostwestfalen which is on the way. Ostwestfalen-Lippe is a region in the federal state North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The area of Ostwestfalen-Lippe is congruent with the area of the administrative region Detmold and includes major cities such as Bielefeld and Paderborn.

We left late on Thursday to avoid the Dutch traffic jams and stopped for the night at the camper park of Bad Bentheim, just a few kilometers behind the German border. While the camper park at the foot of the castle officially has room for 22 campers, also the parking ground next to it was occupied by a large amount of campers already. Since we only wanted to spend the night here, we picked a place and went to bed, trying not to make too much noise.

Spring Tour 2009 – Day 3: For lunch we stopped at the Grande Forge de Buffon, the integrated ironworks near Montbard, established in 1768-72 by Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-82). The Forge can be visited from April until the end of September from 10-12am and 2-6pm. Next to the forge one can see the Canal de Bourgogne, which is 242 kilometers long and links the river Yonne with the Saône.

We didn’t want to wait until 2pm but used the break to check the air filter of our Mercedes-Benz. Occasionally on this and the previous tours the motor had problems accelerating. On the 3rd day of this tour it was worse than ever and we wouldn’t have been able to continue our trip like this
Previously I had checked all oil levels and got the better more expensive fuel but the air filter was something I hadn’t done yet. According the manual there should be a meter notifying us if it has to be replaced or not, but that specific meter didn’t exist in our model. So I found the air filter and took it out. Mercedes obviously believes that a car owner doesn’t do this, so there were no instructions in the manual and it was more difficult than necessary to get the filter out. After cleaning everything as good as possible and putting it all together again, the motor ran smoothly again and didn’t have any more problems for the rest of the trip. What a relief!

Spring Tour 2009 – Day 3: This day felt like our vacation had really started now. Instead of driving all day again, we decided to visit interesting places in the area, as we were moving south. First destination was the wash-house at the Fosse Dionne, a deep water source with a mysterious blue green color below the Sankt-Pierre church in Tonnerre.

Unfortunately the town with just 5322 inhabitants (2006) is a town in decay. Many houses are in a bad condition and on the edge of collapsing. It could be a charming French countryside town. With the Fosse Dionne, the Sankt-Pierre church high above the town (not open to the public), the Hôpital Notre-Dame and some small stores and cafes it could be popular among tourists.

On our way to Tonnerre we drove through the vineyards of the Chablis, the northernmost wine district of the Burgundy region. In April there isn’t much to see yet but it is always nice to see where some products come from.