Landau is the town the Weinstrasse orbits without ever quite touching. With some forty thousand people it is the largest place in the southern Palatinate, and the wine villages that string along the foot of the hills a few kilometres to the west, Birkweiler, Siebeldingen, Frankweiler, all look to it for shopping, schools and trains. It sits on the flat plain of the Rhine rift, so there is nothing dramatic about the ride in, but it is the obvious place in this stretch to refuel, eat properly and sort out anything the bike needs.
The town has a past bigger than it looks. Landau was a free imperial city, then a French fortress for well over a century after the Thirty Years' War, and Louis XIV's engineer Vauban redesigned it into a star-shaped stronghold. Two of his town gates survive, the French Gate and the German Gate, along with stretches of fortification in the parks. After 1815 it went to Bavaria, which ruled the Palatinate until after the Second World War, and the broad streets and big squares owe something to both French and Bavarian planners. The ring of boulevards where the walls used to stand makes the town easy to cross.
There is also a word in the dictionary that came from here: the landau, the four-wheeled carriage with a folding roof, takes its name from the town. And the town claims a share of the region's wine identity, since it is one of the largest wine-growing municipalities in Germany once its incorporated villages, such as Nussdorf and Arzheim, are counted.
For the riding, Landau is a hub rather than a destination. The wine road proper runs along the Haardt edge a short hop west, and from there the roads into the Pfälzerwald are the real reward: the climb through the Queichtal toward Annweiler and the Trifels castle, where the English king Richard the Lionheart was held prisoner in the 1190s, is a fine piece of riding with steady curves through beech and pine. On the plain itself traffic can be heavy at commuting times, and the town has the usual German speed controls, so keep to the limits inside the ring.
Practically, everything is here: fuel stations on the main roads in and out, supermarkets, cafes around the market square and the Rathausplatz, and bakeries selling the pretzel-shaped breakfast that keeps a rider going until lunch. If you are crossing the Palatinate in late summer, look out for the wine festivals that fill almost every weekend in the surrounding villages.