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13-Oct-2009 -- After the successful visit of 49N 8E yesterday on our journey to Haguenau, today we continued our tour through the northern parts of the Alsace region. Lots of small villages made-up of colourful timber-framed buildings are lined up among forests and meadows and hills.

After a while we had reached the north-western parts of Alsace, and it was only a stone's throw left to the neighbouring Lorraine region and the confluence 49N 7E. So I put again a waypoint in my car's navigation system and we soon approached the small village of Sarralbe on the river Sarre, which after entering Germany further downstream changes its name's writing to Saar, and finally flows as a tributary into the river Moselle.

From studying the confluence's location on Google Earth, I knew that there is a track leading close to the Confluence, unfortunately I had forgotten the printouts at home and had to rely on my memory, and so the final approach became a little try-and-error. Although the well-known water tower was already visible from far away, I made some wrong turns into side roads that dead-ended, but finally found the right turnoff from the road N56 onto the agricultural track and could drive without any obstacles about 1 km through the fields to the foot of the water-tower.

The exact confluence spot was then easily located just two steps outside the fence around the water tower, close to the fence's south-western corner. A farmer who was ploughing a neighbouring field was looking curiously at us from his tractor, but did not address us.

Just some dozen metres northeast of the water tower (thus about 60 m northeast of the Confluence) is a small concrete bunker. If we hadn't visited the large WW-II underground fortress "Four à Chaux" yesterday, we possibly wouldn't have paid much attention to this small bunker, but now we could clearly see that its embrasures had the same construction as those on the large fortress, so it clearly dates from the same epoch and thus was a (small) part of the Ligne Maginot, too. Obviously it was built to serve as a lookout from this elevated point which permitted far views in the surrounding area. An unaesthetic detail however is that the small bunker nowadays is filled knee-deep with rubbish.

After having taken the required pictures plus a panoramic view, we left again in the general direction Haguenau.

The following day we visited Strasbourg, and on Thursday we had a closer look at the interesting Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane, a lift for ships on the Marne-Rhine Canal. In the evening we returned home.