Maastricht sits in the thin tail of the Netherlands that squeezes between Belgium and Germany, and you feel the border pressure the moment you leave town. Within a quarter of an hour on a bike you can be in Wallonia, and Aachen is not much further east. The Maas, which the French call the Meuse, runs straight through the middle, and the name of the city is simply the Latin for crossing the river. Romans put a bridge here, and the Sint Servaasbrug, still carrying traffic in its medieval form, is often called the oldest bridge in the country.
The old centre is a tangle of squares and churches that survived better than most Dutch towns. The Vrijthof is dominated by the Romanesque basilica of Saint Servatius, and a few steps away a former Dominican church has been turned into a bookshop, which is the kind of thing this city does well. The Treaty of Maastricht, the one that created the euro, was signed here in 1992, though the locals are prouder of their vlaai, the fruit pies of Limburg, which you should buy before you even think about a proper lunch.
As a place to start a ride it is easy and a little dull in the best sense: the roads out are flat, tidy, and fast to leave. The interesting riding begins to the south and east, where the land folds up into the Heuvelland, the only real hills in the country. Lanes climb and drop between orchards, half-timbered farms and little brick villages, and the surface is generally good, though tractors and cyclists in numbers are normal, especially on a dry weekend. Speed limits are enforced with cameras all over the Netherlands and you should assume that any long straight has one.
Under the Sint Pietersberg south of the centre runs a maze of old marl quarries, tunnelled for centuries, so the city is in a sense hollow beneath its hill. That limestone is also why you find so much pale stone in the older walls.
Fuel is no issue at all in a city of this size, and the ring roads have stations on every side. Parking a motorcycle in the centre is simplest at the edges of the pedestrian zone, and the riverside cafes along the Maas are the natural place to sit down for a coffee before you point the front wheel toward the border.