Kassel is a city that rebuilt itself after being flattened by wartime bombing, so the first impression from the ring road is more concrete than fairy tale. Give it an hour and the other Kassel appears. This is where the Brothers Grimm lived and worked for years in the early nineteenth century, collecting the tales that would make them famous, and the city is the start of the German Fairy Tale Route to Bremen. A museum in the city, the Grimmwelt, tells their story and shows original manuscripts.
The real jewel is the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, a huge hillside park laid out by the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the baroque era, crowned by a giant copper statue of Hercules standing on an octagonal base. On summer afternoons, water cascades down a long staircase of stone steps in a spectacular show, with the water running for about half an hour and taking time to reach the bottom. UNESCO added the park to its World Heritage list in 2013. The park is at the western edge of the city, and the road up to it is a pleasant, gently curving climb.
Kassel is also known for the documenta, a major contemporary art exhibition held every five years, which fills the city with strange installations. The city sits in the valley of the Fulda, with the wooded hills of northern Hesse all around, and the roads out of town are good: quiet, rolling, forested and mostly well surfaced, with the Reinhardswald and the Habichtswald offering a day's riding in either direction. The traffic is heavy on the motorway interchange, and the city centre is a tangle of one-way streets, so use the ring road if you can.
Fuel is easy here, as it is a big city with plenty of stations, and there are good places to eat in the Vorderer Westen district. A speciality is Ahle Wurst, a hard dried sausage from northern Hesse, and a local dish called Weckewerk, a kind of savoury pudding. The ride towards Bremen goes up the Weser valley, through forests and half-timbered villages, so you will hear plenty about Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty before you reach the sea.