#25: [12-Jun-24]

#22: [27-Jul-22]

#23: [29-Oct-19]

#21: [28-Jul-18]

#20: [19-Sep-15]

#24: [15-Aug-15]

#19: [16-Jul-14]

#18: [05-Apr-14]

#16: [22-Dec-12]

#15: [01-Mar-11]

#14: [22-Jun-10]

#12: [09-Jul-08]

#11: [16-Jan-08]

#13: [26-Oct-07]

#10: [12-Sep-07]

#9: [11-May-05]

#8: [18-Jun-04]

#7: [19-May-04]

#6: [23-Feb-02]

#5: [02-Feb-02]

#4: [13-Aug-01]

#3: [29-Mar-01]

#2: [24-Mar-01]

#17: [28-Aug-13] (incomplete)

17-Mar-2001 -- Two weeks ago I heard of the geo confluence website and after browsing the site for a while, I decided that I've got to go visit a confluence myself. (I actually own two different GPS devices: a Magellan 315 and a Garmin eTrex) I also had told a few friends about the project and two of them, Oliver and Sec, decided to come with me to share the experience. :)

The two closest confluences to our home-town Munich have already been visited, so we decided to go for 49N/12E, which is about 100km north of Munich. There's a good Autobahn (something like the Interstates in the US, but without any legal speed limit :) going directly to Regensburg, a city just a few miles away from the confluence. From Regensburg there's another Autobahn that goes east almost exactly, so we decided that we would visit 49N/13E, too, if we had enough time left afterwards (and we did, see our other report).

We started around noon on Saturday the 17th, the weather forecast predicted rain in the evening, so we tried to spend as little time driving as possible. The first few miles went a bit slowly because of holiday-returners who obviously had been skiing in the Alps, but for most parts of the trip the road was clear and our GPSs showed 155mph several times. :> We also had a 1:50.000 map of the area which I had bought the day before, but that didn't stop us from missing the right exit (Oliver said that I drove too fast, I say that he read the map too slowly :) so we approached the confluence from the opposite direction of what we had originally planned.

About 0.2 miles from the confluence we decided that we were at the nearest point reachable by car (at least by my car, an SUV would be a much better choice for confluencers :) and started to walk in the direction that our GPSs indicated. The confluence was in the middle of a small forest and we had to walk downhill quite a few meters until we found a small road (wherever it came from, it was not on our map) which seemed to almost directly lead to the exact location.

As this was our first hunt for a confluence, we had little experience approximating a specific location just by GPS. Of course we forgot to bring a real compass with us, so we first searched on the wrong side of the road deep in the woods, Sec and me with the Magellan 315, Oliver with the Garmin eTrex. Oliver was the first to realize we obviously had a wrong orientation and went to the other side of the road; we followed and after some additional searching we got a perfect reading of 49/00.000N and 12/00.000E on the Magellan just a few meters off the road. We defined a moss covered hump to be at the exact position and started taking the photos. We even managed to place the camera on a tree in a manner that would take a perfect picture of us standing directly on 49N/12E. Oliver also took a bunch of pictures for a full 360 degrees view that he wanted to stitch together for a Quicktime VR file, which we put on a website together with all the photos: http://conflu.i.st.

After finishing the photos we realized that we had not remembered an important hint from the confluence webpage (at least I think I read it there somewhere, but it could also have been on the geocaching page), which is to mark a waypoint at the position of the car :> But thanks to the tracklog in our two GPSs we had no real problems finding back, and there even was enough time left to go for our second confluence on that day, 49N/13E.