07-Jan-2001 -- On Fr 2001-01-05 I learned about the degree confluence
project on my favourite online newspaper. After a brief visit of the web
site I noticed the absence of any confluences documented in Austria. Since
I didn't have any plans for the weekend I looked at
Austrian Map Online to see
where the nearest confluences in the vicinity of Vienna are. The terrain of
N48 E16 looked interesting, so I asked a friend of mine, Günter, if he had
any interest in a visit. We decided to go on Sunday.
Su 2001-01-07: After driving for about 30 min by car, we arrived at the
railway station Taßhof, about 2 km SE of Altenmarkt (Niederösterreich), which
is about 35 km SW of Vienna, the capital of Austria. The weather on Sunday
was not the one we had hoped for. It was completely overcast, with no direct
sunlight on the surface.
The trail to Kienberg and Hocheck passes by the confluence by about
only 30-40 m. We had to ascend 260m, and after some 1.6 km we were near
the confluence. Just before we reached the target altitude of 640m, we entered
the cloud layer you can see on the pictures. With my GPS it was very easy to
approach the confluence. Taking the picture where the GPS shows exactly
N48.00000° E016.00000° was a time consuming job, because the GPS was
drifting a little bit all the time and we had to move around until the display was
right and press the button of the camera. We decided to take a digital
camera (special thanks to Ritu Kenn for borrowing us her Olympus C-820L) and
an ordinary TTL camera (Canon EOS-500N) for backup, just in case. After some
20 minutes of taking pictures, we left for the car.
Since we had enough time of daylight left, we decided to visit the N48 E017
confluence too, which was about 90 km travel by car away. But that's a different
story...