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.

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.

The Verdon river flows into the artificial Sainte-Croix lake, which was our final destination for the day. In les Salles-sur-Verdon we wanted to stay on a campground were Chris and I have been many years before on one of our first trips.

Nearby is also the Solar House Freiburg of the Frauenhofer-Institute, which is a completely self-sufficient house. Next stop was at the Sonnenschiff (Solar Ship), an apartment, office and shopping complex. On the roof, 1000 square meters of solar panels generate about 100.000 kW/h electricity per year. Directly next to the Sonnenschiff one can see the Solarsiedlung, an ecological housing project with 58 family houses.

After this much inspiration it was time for us to move on and after a short stop in Breisach am Rhein we were heading towards Switzerland.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 4:

On our way to the motor home parking we already passed the apartments on Wilmersdorfer Street with their solar front. Those buildings have been refurbishment in 2001. Next to solar architecture Freiburg also has a solar panel factory and is the hometown of some ecological organizations.

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Kakteenland offers more than 1000 different cacti and about 600 other succulent plants on display in a gigantic greenhouse and is free to visit.

In a way it was a strange but fascinating and sometime overwhelming collection of mostly vehicles. It made me wonder why many technological areas like information technologies and photography were not represented. It was fun though to climb on planes and trains and see them from the inside, especially the gigantic Antonov AN-22 transport plane.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 3

Speyer was a pleasant surprise. It is a charming town and we found a great natural food store (there were actually two in the same street).

The motorhome parking is located directly next to a technology museum and we were looking forward to visit it the next day. Unfortunately the motorhome parking is also directly located next to a local airport, which meant that we were falling out of our beds at 7am in the morning when some planes started.

Unfortunately the castle was closed for renovations, so we only had a magnificent view of the Rhine valley to enjoy.