Bernau is the old walled town on the northern edge of the Barnim plateau, and it carries a surprising weight of history for a place that most Berliners know as the end of a railway line. Its medieval wall, with stretches still standing and a few towers, encloses a small centre of brick churches and old houses, and local legend says it was saved in 1432 when the women and children of the town poured boiling beer over Hussite attackers. The story has been told so often that a beer festival in July is named for it.
The label points to the Müritz National Park, a big expanse of lakes and forest more than a hundred kilometres north, where the ride has been all day, so this is the end of a very long loop. In Bernau the contrast is gentle, with a quiet old town and quick links back to Berlin. Just outside, an unusual sight stands among the trees: the former trade union school, built between 1928 and 1930 by the Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, a clean group of buildings that UNESCO added to the World Heritage list in 2017.
The riding around here is easy. The Barnim is a low, rolling plateau of glacial deposits, with farmland, pine woods and small lakes, and the roads run in long, calm lines between villages. Surfaces are mostly good, but cobbled sections still turn up in older streets and some rural lanes. Buch, to the south, belongs to Berlin and holds a large hospital campus with old brick buildings in a park. In late summer, the smell of cut hay and warm pine drifts through the lanes.
Bernau has about thirty-five thousand people, with fuel, shops and cafes in the centre, and the villages nearby, like Rüdnitz, have a bakery or two. Weekday traffic on the main road into Berlin is heavy at rush hour. For a meal, a plate of local fish or game in a beer garden under old trees is the way to go, with a glass of the town's beer to follow.