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.
Sea wind, pine forest and wide horizons. Out of Ribnitz-Damgarten and back again: 293 km, roughly 5 h 03 in the saddle. On the way it passes Ahrenshoop coast art stop, Darß forest road edge and Stralsund old town. It keeps to quiet secondary roads.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 42 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Ribnitz-Damgarten is really two towns that were stitched together by a river. The Recknitz, sluggish and brown as it slides toward the Saaler Bodden lagoon, was for centuries a border: Ribnitz belonged to Mecklenburg, Damgarten to Pomerania, and the two places looked across the water with different rulers and different habits. They merged only in 1950, and the bridge that joins them is still the most important thing in town. It sits on the old main road to the Baltic coast, at the neck of the Fischland-Darß-Zingst peninsula, so nearly everyone riding toward the beaches has to pass through.
Read the complete Ribnitz-Damgarten write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Next is Ahrenshoop coast art stop.
Ahrenshoop is a village where artists came first and tourists followed. In the 1890s painters from Berlin, Munich and elsewhere found this thin strip of land between the Baltic and the Saaler Bodden, drawn by the light, the sea, the reed-thatched cottages and the wide sky, and they founded an artists' colony that still defines the place. The landscape painter Paul Müller-Kaempff was among the first to settle, and the village has been a haven for creative people ever since.
Read the complete Ahrenshoop coast art stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ahrenshoop coast art stop comes up about 42 km into the recorded legs. Next is Darß forest road edge.
The Darß forest is the wildest piece of woodland on the German Baltic coast, and the road that skirts its edge between Born and Prerow runs along the border of a landscape that has been left largely to itself. The Darß Urwald, as it is called, is a mix of beech, alder, pine and birch growing on old dune ridges and wet hollows, where fallen trunks are left to rot and the undergrowth is thick with fern. It belongs to the Western Pomerania Lagoon Area National Park, and walkers follow marked paths among trees draped in moss.
Read the complete Darß forest road edge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 71 km into the recorded legs you reach Darß forest road edge. Next is Stralsund old town.
Stralsund sits on a strip of land between the Baltic and a chain of shallow lagoons, facing the island of Rügen across a narrow sound, and its old town is one of the finest assemblies of brick Gothic in Europe. UNESCO listed it in 2002 together with Wismar, and the reason is plain as soon as you walk onto the Old Market: the great town hall with its ornate, almost theatrical gabled facade, and across the square the enormous church of St Nicholas, built when the town was a rich member of the Hanseatic League and wanted everyone to know it.
Read the complete Stralsund old town write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Stralsund old town, late in the day. Next is Back to Ribnitz-Damgarten.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Ribnitz-Damgarten write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Back to Ribnitz-Damgarten. That is the ride.
This Darß forest road edge → Stralsund old town stretch is for rhythm and scenery. Keep your head up, let the view breathe, and resist turning every open bend into a target. Stop once properly rather than half-stopping everywhere.