Bad Endorf is a spa town in the Chiemgau, a few kilometres west of the Chiemsee, and on a long day to Berchtesgaden it is the kind of place where you top up the tank and keep moving. That is not an insult. The town is tidy and functional, with fuel, bakeries and supermarkets, and it sits in some of the most pleasant rolling country in southern Bavaria, so the stop costs you nothing in scenery.
The spa side of things comes from iodine-rich brine found deep underground, which the town turned into a thermal bath in the twentieth century. You will not have time for a soak on a ride day, but it explains the slightly genteel air of the centre. What is far more interesting from the saddle is the landscape around it. This is glacial country: the great Inn glacier of the last ice age left behind a scatter of lakes and hills when it melted, and the result is a soft patchwork of meadows, woods, moors and small lakes like those of the Eggstätt lake district just south-east of town.
Rimsting, a few minutes away, sits on the western shore of the Chiemsee, the largest lake in Bavaria. From Prien, a little further, boats run out to Herreninsel, where King Ludwig II built his unfinished copy of Versailles. It is a half-day excursion rather than a quick stop, but worth knowing about if you ever come back with time to spare.
The roads around Bad Endorf are a mixture of smooth state roads and narrow farm lanes, often lined with fruit trees and passing through hamlets where the tractors are bigger than the houses. Expect cow muck on the tarmac after the cattle have crossed, especially in the mornings. On a clear day the Chiemgau Alps fill the southern horizon, the Kampenwand and Hochfelln standing out above the foothills, and the ride south towards Traunstein and the German Alpine Road gives you increasingly dramatic views. Summer weekends bring traffic and the occasional police control around the lakes; on a weekday morning in May or September you will have the lanes nearly to yourself, and the air will smell of cut grass and woodsmoke.