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Solar Tour 2008 – Day 4: When we travel we usually just plan a little bit and otherwise collect information abount interesting places to see when we are somewhere and then decide what do to and where to go next. This is how it went with the cactus nursery Kakteenland in Steinfeld, which we saw advertised in a local magazine.

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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.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 4: First thing in the morning we went and visited the Speyer Museum of Technology, which is housed in a former aircraft hangar from the year 1913, now classified as an historical monument. Here one can view airplanes, locomotives, fire engines and old-timers.

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: The night we wanted to stay on the motor home parking of Speyer and as we arrived early enough, we directly took our bikes and rode into town.

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.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 3: One of the places to visit was the Hambach castle, the symbol of German democracy because of the Hambacher Fest which occurred there in 1832.

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

[singlepic=3,200,,,right]Solar Tour 2008 – Day 3: We had a quiet night on the motorhome parking in Bexbach and wanted to see a bit of the area before moving on further south. The town of Homburg seemed interesting with its castle ruin and longest sandstone caves – the Schlossberghöhlen – in Europe. Homburg is also home of the Karlsberg beer brewery, which can be visited as well.

After an interesting morning in Homburg, we wanted to see the next solar park, not too far away on the former U.S. Air Base Sembach. We were able to find it, but more difficult and basically impossible to find was a good spot for a photo. Solar parks look the best from a higher point of view but in this case there wasn’t any. At this moment we realized that it would be insane to drive hundreds of kilometers to any of those other 7 solar parks, always risking bad weather or a location which can’t be reached or photographed. We had always planned to stop in solar town Freiburg on our way, so that became our new direction but since it was too much driving for the rest of the day, we decided to give the Rhineland-Palatinate region a quick visit first.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 2: Before the trip I made a list of 9 solar power plants within the possible region of our tour, based on my own internet research and tried to locate the exact locations of those using Google Earth. The closest solar park was Solarkraftwerk Grube Göttelborn, about 15 km north of Saarbrücken. I didn’t know the exact location and it took us a while to find it.

Unfortunately the weather wasn’t on our side. When we were actually standing on a ramp, allowing us to look down on the impressive amount of 50.000 solar panels, we only had a gray sky and were lucky it didn’t rain.