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.
A 248 km round trip from Luxembourg - roughly 3 h 38 in the saddle. The stops in between: La place forte de Longwy, Igel Column, Moselle Bridge and Barbara Baths. It crosses Luxembourg, France and Germany - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules.
The ride follows Luxembourg Mullerthal Route for 39 km.
For about 10 km this is Moselle Wine Route, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it. Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast.
Luxembourg City is a fortress town built on a rock, and it has the sort of dramatic geography that makes you stop the bike and look. The old town sits on a sandstone promontory surrounded on three sides by the deep gorges of the Alzette and Petrusse rivers, so that the walls rise straight from the valley floor. For centuries it was one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, fought over by Spanish, French, Austrian, Prussian and Dutch armies, and its tangle of tunnels, the Bock Casemates, ran for kilometres inside the cliff. Much of it was dismantled after 1867, but enough survives to be walked. The old quarter and the fortifications are on the UNESCO list.
Read the complete Luxembourg write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Luxembourg is where the day begins. Next is La place forte de Longwy.
In 1678, after Louis XIV won Longwy from the Spanish Netherlands in the Treaty of Nijmegen, he sent his great military engineer Vauban to make sure nobody took it back. Vauban did not just fortify the old town; he built a new one, Longwy-Haut, on the plateau, designing a star-shaped stronghold with bastions, ditches and a geometric grid of streets around a central square with a well and church. It is one of the twelve sites grouped as the Fortifications of Vauban on the World Heritage list, and walking the ramparts you can still read the logic of seventeenth-century siege warfare in the earth and stone.
Read the complete La place forte de Longwy write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
La place forte de Longwy comes up about 39 km into the recorded legs. Next is Igel Column.
The Igel Column is one of those Roman monuments that seems to have survived by a happy accident. It stands in the village of Igel, on the Moselle a few kilometres upstream from Trier, a sandstone pillar some twenty-three metres high, covered with carved scenes. It was built in the third century as a funerary monument for the Secundinii, a family of wealthy cloth merchants, and the reliefs show them at work: bales of cloth being loaded and transported, customers being received, and a family meal, as well as mythological scenes on the upper sections. In the Middle Ages, people came to believe it showed the marriage of Constantine's mother, St Helena, which probably saved it from being broken up for building stone.
Read the complete Igel Column write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
At least about 115 km into the recorded legs you reach Igel Column. Next is Moselle Bridge.
A Roman bridge still carries traffic across the Moselle at Trier, and that is not a figure of speech. The stone piers of the Romerbrucke, the old bridge in the centre of town, date to the second century AD, which makes it the oldest bridge north of the Alps, and cars, cyclists and pedestrians cross it every day on a road deck rebuilt many times over. Trier itself was founded as Augusta Treverorum in the reign of Augustus, grew into one of the great cities of the western empire, and served for a time as an imperial residence. The Emperor Constantine had a basilica built here, still standing with its great hall, and a monumental gate made of dark sandstone, the Porta Nigra, has dominated the northern entrance of the town for eighteen centuries.
Read the complete Moselle Bridge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Moselle Bridge, about halfway. Next is Barbara Baths.
Trier is the city that Germans call the oldest in the country, and the Barbara Baths are among the reasons it can say so with a straight face. Built in the second century AD, when Augusta Treverorum was one of the leading cities of the Roman north, they were once among the largest bathing complexes anywhere outside Rome, a vast rectangle of hot rooms, cold plunges, exercise yards and furnace tunnels. Later centuries treated the building as a quarry, and medieval Trier built houses and a monastery over parts of it, which is why what survives is a maze of walls, arches and basement passages rather than a roofed hall. Walk down into the underground service tunnels and you can see the sooty vaults where slaves tended the fires.
Read the complete Barbara Baths write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Barbara Baths sits at 130 km, about halfway. Next is back through Moselle Bridge.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Moselle Bridge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Moselle Bridge comes up about 127 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Igel Column.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Igel Column write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 135 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Igel Column. Next is back through La place forte de Longwy.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete La place forte de Longwy write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through La place forte de Longwy, late in the day. Next is Luxembourg.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Luxembourg write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 248 km.
Luxembourg → La place forte de Longwy is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
La place forte de Longwy → Igel Column is 76 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Igel Column → Moselle Bridge is 10 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Moselle Bridge → back through Igel Column is 8 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Igel Column → back through La place forte de Longwy is 77 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through La place forte de Longwy → Luxembourg is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.