Coming back into Hannover from the west, the city rises out of flat farmland a little too modestly, with the green mass of the Deister ridge behind you and the tower of a power station somewhere ahead. Hannover does not shout. It is a city of half a million people that was flattened by bombing in the Second World War and rebuilt with more sense than glamour, and the best of it is tucked into corners you have to know about. The Maschsee, a big artificial lake dug by hand in the 1930s as a work programme, is the place the locals walk, run and sail on summer evenings.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher and mathematician who co-invented calculus, spent the last forty years of his life here in service to the ruling family, and the Hannover trade fair, the world's largest industrial show, has filled the city's hotels every spring since the late 1940s. For tourists there is a red line painted on the pavement that leads walkers through the old town, a very Hannover solution to the problem of how to show someone around.
The ride home is the opposite of dramatic, and that is its charm. The last hour from the hills runs along rural roads through the Calenberg country, past fields of sugar beet and wheat, and the little villages of Groß Munzel and Großgoltern, with their brick farms and half-timbered barns. The wind, if there is one, comes from the west and carries a smell of cut grass and diesel. Egestorf, five kilometres away, has the nearest bigger shops, and Barsinghausen has more.
Fuel is plentiful across the whole district, with stations every few kilometres on the roads towards the ring, so you can relax about range here. If you have a spare hour, park near the New Town Hall and take the lift up the dome for a view across the city, which flattens out into plain on every side. Then find a table outside somewhere on the Leine, order a beer, and let the engine tick as it cools.