#18: [25-May-19]

#17: [09-Jul-18]

#16: [20-Dec-14]

#15: [09-Jul-13]

#14: [04-Feb-11]

#12: [18-Jan-09]

#10: [22-Sep-08]

#9: [20-Dec-07]

#8: [28-Apr-06]

#7: [16-Oct-04]

#6: [12-Jun-04]

#5: [16-May-04]

#4: [25-Apr-04]

#13: [12-Apr-03]

#3: [26-Jan-02]

#2: [25-Jul-00]

#1: [02-Apr-00]

#19: [28-Feb-15] (incomplete)

25-Sep-2008 -- Just 3 days after Terje’s dozer visit to 49°N 9°E, me and my colleague David Grimm were to pass through the area. Coming from Zurich, our destination was the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen. The confluence visit was a welcome interruption in the middle of the five-hours-drive.

We left the German Autobahn at the exit Ludwigsburg Nord in 14 km beeline distance from the confluence. The closer we came to the confluence, the less traffic was on the roads and the more attractive got the landscape. At a distance of 1.5 km, we passed though the village Hohenhaslach. This area is an old wine-growing country in the Nature Park Stromberg-Heuchelberg.

We parked at the nearest lot in 650 m distance. According to Terje’s advice, we did not follow the official road called Gottlieb Kurz Weg, because this route is long (and not “kurz” as the name promises). Instead, we walked uphill along the bike-path with some dangerous jumps. For the last 150 m, David and I split up in order to separately approach the confluence. This was an easy exercise, with both of us holding a GPS device and with the dozer still sitting on the point as a striking landmark.

Imagine that you walk through the deep forest looking for a random point and you find it under a bulldozer! Let me assume that there is one dozer each 3 km by 3 km in the forest (probably even less) and suppose the area covered by a dozer to be 10 m², then the chance would be 1 : 1 Million. We got the zero reading on the dozer or sometimes right next to it – the GPS reading was variable due to distortions caused by the trees. After dancing around the dozer for a while, we returned back to our car. But in less than 100 m distance, we found a confluence signpost that had been deployed by the Ottmar-Mergenthaler School in Kleinglattbach and an amateur radio group on 25 July 2000. The translation of the signpost reads:

On the 9^th degree longitude in Germany are the towns Eberbach/Neckar and Sindelfingen. The 9^th degree longitude runs towards the south to Switzerland, Italy (Milan, Genoa), Corsica, Tunisia, Algeria, Niger and Nigeria to the South Pole. The 9^th degree longitude runs from here towards the north through Denmark and Norway to the North Pole. On the 49^th degree latitude are in Germany the cities of Besigheim, Regensburg und Karlsruhe amongst others. The 49^th degree latitude runs from here towards the east to Chech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Dongbei (China), and the Archipelago of the Kuril Islands in the Pacific. The 49^th degree latitude runs from here towards the west through France, North-Atlantic, Newfoundland, Canada and along the north-west border of the West-USA to the Pacific.

CP visit details:

• Distance to a road: 800 m
• Distance to a track: 5 m
• Distance to houses: 1 km
• Time (distance) for the hike: 10 minutes (650 m)
• Time at the CP: 16:45 p.m.
• Measured height: 346 m
• Position accuracy at the CP: 5 m
• Topography: mountainous
• Vegetation: beech forest, some moss at the ground
• Weather: overcast, 14° C (felt temperature)
• Description of the CP: Located 25 km north-west of the city Stuttgart. In the Stromberg-Heuchelberg Natural Park
• Given Name: The Solitary Bulldozer Confluence