Something a bit different, three hours due east of Luxembourg

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Instead of staying in the Ardennes, why not go east, to between Frankfurt and Stuttgart? At least it would be different.

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A round tour of 286 km (180 miles) courtesy of Motorrad & Reisen magazine October / November 2020 edition

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Download the route from the magazine’s website, using the tour code or create it from the map, it wouldn’t be hard.

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I have a small tour I do from home to Korsika and Strassburg and back again. Only takes 3 hours, depending on the degree of curvy'ness :D
 

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Germany............

europes best kept biking secret.............

It certainly is. Closer than Italy, Spain and Austria.

I am planning on doing more there next year.

I actually quite like German food, am I weird?

There is certainly plenty of it. I always like the little dustbin thing they have at breakfast, to put all the left over debris in.
 
A great stop off is Rotenberb on the Tauber.

Properly beautiful and you can relive those scary as fuck child snatcher from chitty chitty bang bang moments...........
 
From the same magazine but the July/ August 2018 edition, something around the same area:

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In magenta, at 95 miles it joins on nicely to the jaunt (in blue) shown above:

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Base yourself in somewhere like Reichelsheim, which looks OK on Google. TripAdvisor and Booking.com list several hotels in the town, which will all probably welcome bods on motorcycles and can’t all be crap.

The ‘biker friendly’ partner hotel is not far from Reichelsheim, http://www.laermfeuer.de/ in Im Oberdorf. You can see its location in the little leg out on the magenta route at the top.
 
Base yourself in somewhere like Reichelsheim, which looks OK on Google.

Michelstadt is a far nicer town with an "olde worldy" center but of course the hotel prices may reflect that. The road from Reichelsheim to Michestadt is a great bit of twisty, uphill road - the B47.
The B3 that runs N-S is a real pain, especially if its spring/summer. People in their droves go there to see the cherry blossoms in spring on the Seeheim-Jugenheim/Zwingenberg stretch.
Far better to pick the "L" roads in most of the area If you are not on an A to B ride.
 
Good German reds around there if you like them - which I do, whites as well actually :rolleyes:
 
I have added in this suggestion from Alpentourer magazine’s issue 5/2016, the route being downloadable as a gps file from the magazine’s website. It didn’t download quite properly (this happens sometimes) but a little bit of work would tidy it all up. If nothing else, it shows how ideas from various sources can all be added together.

First, a very quick Google of where Lohr am Main (in the centre of the suggested route) is, just to orientate yourself:

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Do you want some ideas on how to get from Calais to Michelstadt, the town recommended by a local (Redboots) as somewhere to maybe stay? That is easy, ask Kurviger and / or ViaMichelin to throw up some suggestions, in seconds:

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With a bit of imagination, anyone could make a jaunt of seven to 10 days, going out from Calais, via the Ardennes to this attractive part of Germany and back to Calais, without to much difficulty. At least you’d see something different than flogging down to the Alps..... again! Want to make it a bit longer? Easy, go to the Benelux section and add in some ideas from there. For example, you could use the Kurviger suggestion to dive off to Bouillon and use that as a base, it’s mentioned loads of times in posts. Fancy some WW2 stuff? Easy, head via Bastogne. Want some Great War sites? Use the ViaMichelin suggestion and stop in or near Verdun. Surf around on the internet and in the forum. Just putting Odenwald into Google throws up ideas. This from the guardian in 2008:

Germany: What's not to like?

Harry Pearson discovers a countryside idyll in Germany's Odenwald region - the only mystery is, why more of us aren't flocking there

One evening in early June a friend and I sat on the terrace of his family's holiday home on a hillside above a small village in the Odenwald, an area of rolling, wooded countryside that stretches from east of the Rhine in southern Hesse all the way to Bavaria. It had been 25C for almost a week and our children had spent the afternoon in an outdoor swimming pool filled with fresh spring water, while the grown-ups sprawled in the grass eating ice-cream flavoured with woodruff and big slices of baked cheesecake.

It was evening and we sat drinking a hefty, dark doppelbock from a local brewery, the splendidly named, Schmucker. "Do you think," my friend said, "other English people would like it if they came here?"

I took a sip of my beer and examined the view. On the other side of the narrow valley a herd of caramel-coloured cattle moved lethargically across a flower-speckled meadow towards their byre in a small half-timbered farmstead to which the kids went each morning to buy unpasteurised milk from a little old lady in a pinny. The only sound was the breeze in the scotch pines behind the house, the calling of a cuckoo and the rustling of some dormice that had taken up residence in the eaves. The Odenwald is the site of the Nibelungen Saga. Two miles from where we were sitting Siegfried clubbed the dragon Regin to death and bathed in his blood, but the benign and placid scene in front of me called to mind Heidi rather than Kriemhild. "Of course," I told my friend, "Who wouldn't like it? The problem is to get them to come here".

Aside from Munich and Berlin, English people show a marked reluctance to visit Germany. The German Tourist Board in London works tirelessly, their French counterparts, meanwhile, simply crook a finger, the Italians merely wink. Suggest a travel book about the country to a publisher and he or she will suck air and recall the time they did one a decade ago and the huge, unsold piles that still remain. It wasn't always like this. At one time the Black Forest and Rhine cruises were immensely popular with British tourists. But just as our national taste in wine has shifted over the years until the once apparently unstoppably popular Liebfraumilch has more or less disappeared from our tables altogether, so Germany has gradually slipped off the holiday map.

It is a pity, because Germany has much to offer and, since the arrival of the euro, appears somewhat cheaper to visit than its neighbours too. If Germany has an equivalent to La France Profonde (Deutschland Gemutlich?) then the Odenwald is surely it. Aside from a couple of small, well-preserved medieval towns, Michelstadt and Erbach, the main attraction is the gentle, hilly countryside, a place of high meadows and deep woods, where flocks of goats wander beneath the snowy blossom of apple and pear trees. We spent our week walking on the gravel paths that lead over the hills - the highest is about a thousand feet – watching out for wild boar, red deer and pine martens. On one we climbed up a wooden tower and, looking south-eastwards, could see the outlines of Castle Frankenstein.

We never took food with us, because as Jerome K Jerome observed in his typically genial celebration of a holiday in the Black Forest "Three Men On The Bummel" Germany is so well-ordered a place that no sooner has the hiker thought "Mmm, I could do with a drink and possibly a slice of cake," than he turns a corner and finds himself confronted by a rustic inn presided over by a convivial man in an apron who has pledged his life to that exact purpose.

The Odenwald is the only place in Germany where the local drink of choice is cider (Appelwoi). It's a dry, flat variety that is served ice cold in stoneware jugs called Bembels. Before we sampled it our friends cautioned us about its earthy qualities and assured us that, "It tastes better after the third glass". My partner is from Herefordshire, however, and as she remarked afterwards "If they think that stuff was rough we'll have to take them to Ross-on-Wye sometime".

Appelwoi is traditionally accompanied by Kochkasse, a semi-soft white cheese that my friend's son memorably described as "looking like a big plate of flab". The cheese is sprinkled with cumin seeds and eaten on sourdough bread with a big dollop of sliced pickled onions. The selection of cakes, amongst which the mighty Frankfurt Kranz (the family-sized version contains 16 eggs) is the stand out, may have more appeal to the less adventurous traveller, or those planning to kiss anybody in the next fortnight.

In the evenings, tired from the day's exertions, we sit outside and watch the sun go down drinking beer and raspberry eau de vie from the distillery in nearby Furth, listening to the woodpeckers and the first hooting of the owls. At midnight the streetlights in the village go out automatically plunging the valley into velvety darkness. "You, though," my friend says, "could try and persuade people". I tell him that I will do my best.

Then do nothing more than add the word ‘Motorrad’ after ‘Odenwald’ and see what Google chucks out..... Bingo! Another made to measure idea, thus time from Louise.de:

https://www.louis.de/fuer-die-motorradreise/tourentipps/deutschland/mitte/odenwald

How good is that, it’s another really clear map and another idea for free:

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Surf on a bit more and there’s another different suggestion, this time from an earlier issue of Motorrad & Reisen:

https://www.motorradundreisen.de/motorradtour/421_odenwald-alle-kurven-tour.html

Watch a video or two, perhaps:

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Yeah, I know, their road positioning was crap and there’s comfort braking but you can look at some scenery and at least the bod took the trouble to post the video up.

You have days of lockdown and then the winter to endure, so you might as well do something. If nothings else it will save posting up: “Me and my six mates want.....”

An instant holiday in a few clicks. If can do it on an iPad, anyone can.

Enjoy your wander..... and let us know when you do it, please.


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You might even find the very good wine that is mentioned in the posts above:

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Just a couple of words of warning, I was over that way a couple of years ago at a wedding a bit further East by Hof, and the wedding was in village in the old East Germany, things to note, there are virtually NO motorway services there are rest areas with toilets, water and sometimes air for tyres but thats it. Almost all the services are just of the motorway/main A road junctions so you can access the service area from both roads, they are not 24hrs and most of them NOT open on Sundays, or if they are it is very restricted opening hours, local fuel stations also not open on a Sunday and visa/mastercards did not seem to be accepted by the systems, So I you go further east into the old east germany, just be aware sometimes getting fuel can be a problem either late at night or on a Sunday it caught out a couple of people who thought they would fill up in the morning before setting off back home on the Sunday to find that they couldn't!!
 
The top tip for biker areas like the Odenwald and Spessart is to avoid the weekends if you can.
The roads are full of cyclist/bikers/sports-car drivers and the general weekender traffic.
 
I love Germany, was lucky enough to get 10 days on the bike there in September
Spent years driving a truck there and seeing nothing but motorways, services and industrial estates
It's an absolutely stunning country to ride a bike, also as mentioned it's almost on our doorstep too
What really amazes me is just how their town and city centres seem to be thriving compared to ours, walking around Heidelberg at 7 in the evening
and the place was buzzing, most shops were small independents, and Gellato everywhere, even the smaller towns were the same

Love taking the bike down to Spain/Portugal etc. but for the next few years I think i'm gonna concentrate more on Germany/Austria/Switzerland, because of the distance too I think 2 or 3 shorter trips make be the way to go
 
As an idea as to how just seeing a word, can trigger an idea.... Spessart

I am not particularly good at knowing the specific German areas, but I half recognised it / guessed. So I Googled ‘Spessart Motorrad’ and up came:

https://kurvenkoenig.de/motorrad/spessart.html

And then:

https://motorradstrassen.de/touren/tourentipps/motorradurlaub-spessart

Then:

https://www.spessartland.de/motorrad_fahren.shtml

Then:

http://www.bikeninfranken.de/downloads/spessart.pdf

And:

https://www.frankentourismus.de/wege/motorradtour_spessart-mainland-443/

Another suggestion from Louis.de, this time longer:

https://cdn4.louis.de/r/6972bd3d94a3210119da1541cba555f99fa6b15a/de52_tour04.pdf

And then:

https://www.bikerbetten.de/tour/zwischen-main-und-spessart-ca-230-km

‘Biker friendly’ places to stay:

https://www.mein-tourenhotel.de/motorradhotels_spessart









More stuff that can be bolted to the other ideas. By now, anyone can see that it must be somewhere worth visiting, simply as there are loads of webpages dedicated to the whole region..... and it’s only a tiny (relatively) area of Germany.

People knock Google as some evil creation. I see it as something very different; a way to find out ‘things’ (I can’t think of a better word) to then apply a bit of my own imagination to, all without stepping outside my front door.
 
A bit further north than Frankfurt I know, but just outside of Battenberg is Hotel Sassor - a most excellent biker friendly place, with great rooms, food, beer and covered bike parking and workshop.
They have great BBQ's in the summer
The roads here in the Sauerland are excellent and I think, a bit of a hidden gem, off the normal route and very easy to get to from the UK.

https://www.hotel-sassor.de/

https://www.sauerland.com/erleben/Outdooraktivitaeten/Motorradfahren


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Edit: Anyone surfing around in this thread and having their curiosity sparked, can have a look at: https://www.ukgser.com/forums/showthread.php/515407-Sauerland-(including-the-Dam-Busters)
 
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I think delamitri and others have summed it up right. The western side of Germany, is just a short hop across from the Ardennes. The Harz and Eifel are well know, the Black Forest especially so, but there is so much more. Rather like the alps forming a barrier, so nobody much goes deep into Italy, the Rhine (and possibly a fear of industrial Germany in the Ruhr) puts people off. That and maybe a perception that it’s, “All flat and boring, mate”.

I was lucky enough to lap Germany, riding around its outside edges in a clockwise circle, so got to see lots of it. I really do want to start to fill in the bits in the middle as it were, which was partly why I created the German sub-section just a year or so ago. The entire bulk of the country was all but ignored, as the site concentrated on the mountains, of which Germany has all but none. There again, there was no Benelux sub-section either; now it’s one of the busiest.

Hopefully the ideas I put up (all stolen from somewhere) will give bods ideas of their own to try. At least it’s somewhere different. Similarly, I hope it gives bods some ideas on how to start to create their own holidays, not least as the same (very basic) ideas can work for anywhere. Give it a go. What is the worse that can happen?

Richard
 
I went to the East, of Berlin in 1997 and echo what Bowser said

I love Germany and Austria for riding - great places to visit
 


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