The Hannover fair grounds, one of the biggest exhibition centres in the world, lie just to the north of Laatzen, and for a few days each year the whole region fills with trade visitors. The dot sits on the southern edge of the city, at the gate of the Laatzen suburb, among a mix of warehouses, shopping centres and tidy residential streets. It is not a place that anyone visits for itself, but it is the right doorstep for a ride east to the Harz, because the autobahn and the quiet back roads both start here.
The Harz is the high point of northern Germany, a rounded range of granite and slate whose highest summit, the Brocken, reaches 1,141 metres and is often wrapped in cloud. It is famous for witches. Goethe set the Walpurgis Night scene of Faust on the Brocken, and every year on the night of 30 April, locals dress as witches and dance on the hills. A narrow-gauge steam railway still puffs to the summit from Wernigerode, and the sight of the little locomotive with its plume of white steam against dark spruce is one of the region's best photographs.
The overnight stop is Quedlinburg, a town of about twenty-four thousand people at the northern edge of the Harz, which has more than a thousand half-timbered houses and is on the UNESCO list. Henry I, the first king of the Germans, is said to have been elected here in 919, and the castle hill carries a Romanesque church of great beauty and a treasury that survived the centuries. The town has a particular atmosphere in the evening, when the day visitors depart and the lamps come on along the cobbled lanes.
The riding in the eastern Harz is excellent. Roads climb in broad bends through spruce forest and cross high moorland, with wide views over the plain, and the Selke valley has a particularly lovely winding road. Rübeland has caves open to visitors, and Thale has a rock plateau, the Hexentanzplatz, reached by cable car. Weather can be wet and misty, and the upper roads may have snow into spring.
Fuel is easy in Laatzen and on the autobahn, and in the Harz towns of Halberstadt and Wernigerode. Bring a warm layer for the summit.