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Solar Tour 2008 – Day 9: Soon after Trigance, we reached the Verdon Gorge, the world’s second largest gorge with a length of 25 kilometers and up to 700 meters deep. We’ve visited this impressive canyon a couple of time before but each time it is worth the visit. It is just breathtaking to see the ravine, which the turquoise-green Verdon river has cut through the limestone.

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.

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.

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.

Solar Tour 2008 – Day 2: After having breakfast with the family, we quickly got on the road again heading towards the Mosel wine region. Here we visited the bio-organic winery of Herbert Scholtes and returned our two empty wine crates, of course not without getting new supply. Our favorite is their Weißburgunder (Pinot blanc), a full-bodied dry white wine. September and October are the busy months at the Mosel, when many tourists visit countless wine festivals. We don’t enjoy such busy mass-tourism and since we’ve visited the Mosel river before, we decided to try to reach our first solar power location.