walker-online

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.