Castle Road: Mannheim to Nuremberg

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Mannheim

   Mannheim is a city laid out like a chessboard, and that tells you most of what you need to know about it. The old centre was planned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Electors Palatine, who built a vast baroque palace on the flat ground where the Neckar meets the Rhine and then arranged the streets in squares with letters and numbers instead of names. Locals call it the Quadratestadt. You will find that nobody needs a satnav to cross the middle of town, which is a rare luxury for a rider starting a long day.

   Read the complete Mannheim write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Mannheim is where the day begins. Next is Heidelberg.

2. 2. Heidelberg

   Heidelberg is the place that German Romantics made famous and Mark Twain made funny. The Neckar comes out of its wooded valley here and slips past a steep old town, a stone bridge with a gate, and above everything the red sandstone ruins of the castle. Visitors have been climbing up to look at it since the early nineteenth century, when poets and painters arrived and decided it was the most beautiful ruin in Germany. The damage was done by French troops in the 1680s and 1690s, in a war of succession, and a lightning strike finished the job later, so it was never a romantic wreck by design.

   Read the complete Heidelberg write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Heidelberg comes up about 45 km into the recorded legs. Next is Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

3. 3. Rothenburg ob der Tauber

   Rothenburg ob der Tauber looks like a film set because, for a long time, it had no choice. The medieval town stands on a ridge above the Tauber valley in Franconia, enclosed by an almost complete ring of walls with towers and gates, and its timber houses, steep roofs and cobbled lanes have survived because the town lost its wealth after the Thirty Years War and could not afford to rebuild. It was too poor to modernise, and so it stayed old. Today it draws visitors in large numbers, and the main streets can be packed with tour groups by mid-morning.

   Read the complete Rothenburg ob der Tauber write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 321 km into the recorded legs you reach Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Next is Nuremberg.

4. 4. Nuremberg

   Nuremberg wears its history heavily and with some honesty. The old town sits inside a ring of walls on both banks of the Pegnitz, crowned by the Kaiserburg, the imperial castle on its sandstone ridge, where the Holy Roman emperors held court. In the late Middle Ages the city was one of the richest in Germany, a centre of trade, craft and invention, and the home of the painter Albrecht Dürer, whose house you can still visit, as well as of the toy-makers, gingerbread bakers and instrument makers who made it famous.

   Read the complete Nuremberg write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Nuremberg closes the day.