13-Oct-2001 -- Take off on Saturday, Oct. 13th 2001 at 9:00 a.m. in Villach. As there was no unvisited confluence point left in our home country, Austria, we had to go to Northern Italy in the province of Veneto to find our very first one. As we wanted to be in the area as early as possible – we did not know what we had to expect there - we left Vienna on Friday evening and met near the Italian border. It was one of these great days of “Altweibersommer” – it was just a perfect day!!!

12:00 a.m. after only a short coffee-break in a small Italian village we arrived in Lentiai. Everything what the maps told us was, that a small road would lead us near to the top of Mont Artent (1182 m). – The closest we could get to the confluence point by car.

Finding out that navigation without a magnetic compass and without exact maps of the area was quite a challenge, we tried to reach the confluence point from various directions but we were always stopped by a steep slope.

16:45 (our GPS shows winter time) - we finally found the confluence point! We got there by climbing down a very steep slope through the woods. Due to the fact that we had no continuous GPS signal during our descent, we had problems in localizing our target. We knew that we found the right position when the GPS stabilized very closely around 46 degrees North and 12 degrees East. By now we were really exhausted, we had climbed around in the mountains for hours. What a surprise when we found out that the confluence point was just some meters above a small forest track. As the photos of the 4 compass directions did not give an impression of the beautiful surrounding we preferred to make a panoramic shot at some meters distance.

At last, we started our way back uphill as the sun was already setting. We got back to the car when it was getting dark. On our way down to Lentiai, we stopped at a small mountain bar to celebrate our first confluence point with a glass of wine.