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: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Heidelberg it runs 315 km to Heidelberg; allow about 4 h 12 of riding. On the way it passes Worms Synagogue Compound, Old Jewish Cemetery Worms, Connecting ditch system and Large Reut Pond. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 46 km this is Castle Road, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
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 is where the day begins. Next is Worms Synagogue Compound.
In the Middle Ages, three Rhineland cities, Speyer, Worms and Mainz, were the centres of Jewish learning in northern Europe, and they gave their initials, in Hebrew, to a community known as ShUM. The Jewish communities of these cities developed traditions, laws and customs that influenced Ashkenazi Jewry for centuries, and their monuments were listed together by UNESCO in 2021. In Worms, the synagogue compound includes the synagogue, rebuilt after its destruction by the Nazis in 1938, the women's synagogue, the mikveh, a ritual bath dating from the twelfth century, and the Rashi house, now a Jewish museum, named after the great medieval scholar who studied here.
Read the complete Worms Synagogue Compound write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Worms Synagogue Compound comes up about 46 km into the recorded legs. Next is Old Jewish Cemetery Worms.
The Heiliger Sand in Worms is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe, with gravestones going back to the eleventh century. Weathered sandstone slabs lean at angles among the grass and trees, carved with Hebrew inscriptions, some barely legible after nearly a thousand years. Pebbles and small notes lie on many of them, left by visitors as a sign of remembrance, especially on the grave of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, a great scholar of the thirteenth century who died in captivity. Together with the synagogue and ritual bath of Worms and the Jewish sites of Speyer and Mainz, the cemetery forms the ShUM Sites, listed by UNESCO in 2021, recognising the Rhineland communities that shaped Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the Middle Ages.
Read the complete Old Jewish Cemetery Worms write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 47 km into the recorded legs you reach Old Jewish Cemetery Worms. Next is Connecting ditch system.
The monks who founded Maulbronn were Cistercians, and they believed that a monastery should be a self-sufficient world, with its own mill, workshops, fields and, above all, its own water. The abbey, founded in 1147, is today the best-preserved medieval monastery north of the Alps, and a large part of its genius lies in the network of ponds, canals and ditches that the monks dug to collect water from the surrounding hills, drive mills and flush drains. The connecting ditch system is part of that story, a quiet piece of engineering that has lasted for nearly nine hundred years. UNESCO inscribed the monastery complex in 1993.
Read the complete Connecting ditch system write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Connecting ditch system, about halfway. Next is Large Reut Pond.
The Große Reutteich is one of the ponds that the monks of Maulbronn created in the folds of the hills around their abbey, and at three kilometres from the monastery it is among the more distant ones. That distance makes it quieter, with less foot traffic and more sense of being in the woods. The pond sits in a shallow valley with trees on its banks, and the surface is calm and dark under the canopy.
Read the complete Large Reut Pond write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Large Reut Pond sits at 152 km, about halfway. Next is back through Connecting ditch system.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Connecting ditch system write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Connecting ditch system comes up about 160 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Old Jewish Cemetery Worms.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Old Jewish Cemetery Worms write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 267 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Old Jewish Cemetery Worms. Next is back through Worms Synagogue Compound.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Worms Synagogue Compound write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Worms Synagogue Compound, late in the day. Next is Heidelberg.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Heidelberg write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 315 km.
Heidelberg → Worms Synagogue Compound is 46 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Old Jewish Cemetery Worms → Connecting ditch system is 106 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Connecting ditch system → back through Old Jewish Cemetery Worms is 107 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Worms Synagogue Compound → Heidelberg is 46 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.