Dannenberg sits on the Jeetzel, a slow, brown little river that wanders through the Wendland, the odd bulge of Lower Saxony that pokes east across the Elbe almost to Brandenburg. For years the East German border ran a few kilometres away, and the region still has the faintly forgotten feel of a place that was a dead end. Riders from Hamburg tend to find that rather pleasant. The traffic is thin, the villages are low and tidy, and nobody is in a hurry.
The town itself is small enough to walk end to end in a quarter of an hour. There is a stump of old castle, the Waldemarturm, standing above the lower town, and a market square with the kind of brick and half-timber that survived because nothing important ever happened to it. That is a joke, but only half of one: Dannenberg is better known to Germans for the protests around the nuclear waste store at nearby Gorleben, which for decades brought tractors, sit-downs and yellow crosses to these fields. You still see the crosses in some gardens. It is worth knowing that history when you notice how many cafés and bakeries here cater to a politically opinionated, slightly bohemian crowd.
As a stop it does the job well. With more than eight thousand people it has several fuel stations, supermarkets and a handful of places to sit down with a proper lunch, and parking a bike on the square is no trouble. A regional habit worth trying is the baked goods and the sausage from local butchers, plain and good, with nothing that needs explaining.
What I like most is what lies around the town. The Wendland is famous for its Rundlinge, villages laid out in a ring around a central green with all the farm gables facing inward, an arrangement that goes back to Slavic settlers. Ride a few kilometres in almost any direction and you can find one, usually on a road where you meet more cyclists than cars. The surface is mostly good, the corners are gentle, and the landscape is soft: wet meadows, alder carrs, the occasional stork nest on a chimney. Add the Elbe dikes just to the north and you have a day of easy, unpressured riding. Come in late spring or early autumn, when the light is low and the fields smell of cut grass or wood smoke.