CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: planning record, not independently verified geometry.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distances and riding times are planning figures. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Mannheim it runs 814 km to Karlovy Vary; allow about 11 h 06 of riding. On the way it passes Heidelberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Nuremberg and Bamberg. It crosses from Germany into Czechia - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 37 km this is Castle Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Mannheim is where the day begins. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Heidelberg comes up about 37 km into the recorded legs. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 265 km into the recorded legs you reach Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Next is 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.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nuremberg, about halfway. Next is Bamberg.
Bamberg is one of those German cities that came through the twentieth century almost undamaged, so its old centre feels more like a seventeenth-century drawing than a place that has been repaired. It was listed by UNESCO in 1993, and it is easy to see why: it stretches across seven hills, like Rome, with the cathedral and the old bishop's residence on the highest, the Regnitz river looping through the middle, and rows of half-timbered houses and fishermen's cottages along the water. The little town hall sits on an artificial island in the river, reached by bridges, and has frescoes that seem to spill out over the walls.
Read the complete Bamberg write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Bamberg sits at 543 km, about halfway. Next is Bayreuth.
Bayreuth is the town where one man's operas became a pilgrimage. Richard Wagner moved here in the 1870s and built a festival theatre on a hill outside the town, designed to his own ideas, with a hidden orchestra pit and a plain brick exterior. The first festival was held in 1876, and every summer since, thousands of people have made the trip to hear his operas. The tickets are so hard to obtain that the waiting list is said to be measured in years.
Read the complete Bayreuth write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Bayreuth comes up about 609 km into the recorded legs. Next is Karlovy Vary.
Legend has it that Emperor Charles IV was out hunting in the forests of western Bohemia in the fourteenth century when a stag he was chasing, or in some versions one of his hounds, fell into a pool of scalding water, and that is how the hot springs of Karlovy Vary were found. Whatever the truth, the town that grew up around them bears his name, Karlsbad in German, and by the nineteenth century it had become one of the most fashionable spas in Europe, visited by tsars, composers, poets and the cream of European society. In 2021, it became part of the UNESCO listing of the Great Spa Towns of Europe.
Read the complete Karlovy Vary write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Karlovy Vary closes the day.
Mannheim → Heidelberg is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Heidelberg → Rothenburg ob der Tauber is 228 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Rothenburg ob der Tauber → Nuremberg is 137 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Nuremberg → Bamberg is 107 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Bamberg → Bayreuth is 100 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Bayreuth → Karlovy Vary is 205 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.