CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. 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 459 km one-way ride from near Lehrte, about 6 h 32 of riding. On the way it passes Peine, Königslutter Elm road and Helmstedt old town stop. The climbs: Schöningen ridge and Okertal bends. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
8 km through ground somebody thought worth listing. The road passes it rather than bypassing it — speed drops and stays down. Park rather than crawl through.
For 12 km this is German Timber Frame Road Central Section, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it. Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast.
This is not postcard Germany but working Germany, which has its own appeal. The Mittelland Canal, the big east-west waterway that links the Rhine and the Elbe, runs close by, and barges of a thousand tonnes slide along it as calmly as swans. Misburg, just to the north, was a cement town for a century and still carries traces of that heavy industry, with chalk pits turned into lakes.
Read the complete Hannover east edge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hannover east edge is where the day begins. Next is Peine.
Peine is a steel town, and it has never pretended otherwise. A rolling mill has stood on the edge of the town since the nineteenth century, and the smoke, the chimneys and the sound of trains hauling girders still shape the skyline. The people who work in it live in tidy brick streets, and the main square has the honest, unshowy look of a place that makes things rather than sells postcards. As a fuel stop, it fits the mood perfectly: efficient, plain, with all you need and nothing you do not.
Read the complete Peine fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Peine is the fuel stop for this leg. Next is Königslutter Elm road.
Königslutter has a cathedral that looks as if it belongs in Lombardy, and the reason is that the men who built it had been to Italy. The Kaiserdom, a great Romanesque church of pale stone begun in the 1130s, was founded by Emperor Lothar the Third, who is buried inside, and the craftsmen who carved its apse brought with them a style from the south. Round the outside runs a frieze of hunters chasing a stag, with hounds, a boar and an unlikely fox, and by the entrance sit a pair of lions with columns on their backs, one of them with a little man in its paws. They are some of the best medieval sculptures in northern Germany, set in a small Lower Saxon town that gets few crowds.
Read the complete Königslutter Elm road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
74 km in you reach Königslutter Elm road. Next is Helmstedt old town stop.
Helmstedt is a town that has lived through several lives. In the sixteenth century it was a university town: the Academia Julia, founded in 1576 by Duke Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, drew scholars from across Europe, and its handsome building, the Juleum, still stands in the old quarter. The university closed in 1810, but the streets kept their half-timbered charm, with lovely house fronts and a little market square that is a pleasure to sit in.
Read the complete Helmstedt old town stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Helmstedt old town stop, early in the day. Next is Schöningen ridge.
Schöningen has a reputation that has nothing to do with riding, and it is a startling one. In the 1990s, archaeologists working ahead of the lignite diggers found wooden spears here that were about three hundred thousand years old, the oldest known hunting weapons in the world, along with the bones of horses butchered by the people who threw them. The finds changed what scientists thought early humans could do, since the spears were balanced like modern javelins and made with real skill. A modern museum beside the old mine, shaped like a lump of glass and steel, tells the story and shows a reconstruction of the shore where the hunters worked.
Read the complete Schöningen ridge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Schöningen ridge tops the climb. Next is Wolfenbüttel food stop.
Wolfenbüttel is a town of books and timber. For nearly three centuries the dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel ruled from the castle here, and one of them, Duke August the Younger, built up a library in the seventeenth century that became one of the largest in Europe. The Herzog August Library still stands, and the philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing worked in it as librarian in the eighteenth century and wrote part of his drama Nathan the Wise in the town. Its old reading rooms and the remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts make it one of the few libraries in the world worth visiting for the building alone.
Read the complete Wolfenbüttel food stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Wolfenbüttel food stop is where this day stops to eat. Next is Back to Hannover.
On the eastern side of Hannover, the city stretches into leafy suburbs, and the dot lies near the Mittelland Canal, among tidy housing estates and patches of woodland. Hannover is a big, sensible city, rebuilt after heavy bombing in the Second World War, and it has an unexpectedly green heart in the Eilenriede, a city forest of old oaks and beeches, one of the largest urban forests in Europe, where people ride, jog and walk dogs between the lakes and meadows.
Read the complete Hannover write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back to Hannover closes the day. Next is Hannover south-east escape.
The southeastern edge of Hannover is where the city dissolves into the villages of the Calenberg land, and the first miles of this ride are a gentle introduction to it. Laatzen, a town of forty thousand, lies three kilometres away, while Pattensen and Hemmingen sit a little further out, each with its own old village heart and a ring of newer houses. The Leine river meanders through the meadows between them, and its floodplain, wide, green and often shrouded in morning mist, gives the district a quiet, watery character that surprises people who only know the city.
Read the complete Hannover south-east escape write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
You start here, at road level. Next is Hildesheim.
Hildesheim looks, from the ring road, like any prosperous middle-sized German city, with chain stores, car dealers and a ring of fuel stations, and that is exactly why it is a useful gate. Over a hundred thousand people live here, the fuel is plentiful, and the town sits in the open farmland of the Hildesheimer Börde, where black soil grows sugar beet and wheat. Filling up here before the Harz means you can take the hills without watching the needle, because once you climb towards Bad Harzburg and the Okertal the villages get small and stations get scarce.
Read the complete Hildesheim fuel gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Next is Goslar old town edge.
Goslar has been a town of silver and emperors for a thousand years, and its old centre feels like the set of a very long play. The Rammelsberg mine, just south of the town, produced copper, lead, zinc and silver from the early Middle Ages until 1988, making it one of the longest-working mines in history, and the wealth from it paid for the town's splendid half-timbered houses, its guildhalls and its churches. UNESCO has listed both the mine and the old town as World Heritage.
Read the complete Goslar old town edge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Goslar old town edge comes up 332 km in. Next is Okertal bends.
The Oker comes out of the high Harz in a hurry, and the road through its valley follows the river's rush from the dam above down to the plain at Goslar. The valley is narrow, steep and wooded, with granite crags poking through the spruce above the road, and for a few kilometres it feels like a small Alpine gorge dropped into northern Germany. It is one of the best known bike roads in the Harz, and on a fine weekend you will see that the riders know it.
Read the complete Okertal bends write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Okertal bends is the summit of this stretch. Next is Torfhaus high road.
Torfhaus is where the Harz stops pretending to be a gentle hill country. The settlement is little more than a cluster of buildings strung along the B4 at somewhere around 800 metres, between Bad Harzburg on the northern edge and Braunlage to the south, and it stands on open moorland where the spruce forest gives way to bog and wind. On a clear day the Brocken, at 1,141 metres the highest summit in northern Germany, stands over the horizon as a bald, slightly sinister dome, and it is the reason most people stop here. On a bad day you will see nothing at all, because this is one of the foggiest and wettest corners of the country.
Read the complete Torfhaus high road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Torfhaus high road, late in the day. Next is Bad Harzburg food stop.
Bad Harzburg is a spa town at the northern gate of the Harz, a place of grand villas, a Kurpark, a casino and, on the hill behind it, a cable car that carries visitors to the ruins of a medieval castle. The castle, called the Harzburg, was built in the eleventh century by Emperor Henry the Fourth as part of his campaign to control the Saxon lands, and when the Saxon nobles rebelled in 1074 they destroyed it. The ruin is mostly a few walls and a tower stump now, but the place has a dramatic position, and a viewing area gives a wide look over the plain to the north.
Read the complete Bad Harzburg food stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Food at 442 km, roughly 9 hours into the riding.
Hannover is not the first name that comes to mind when riders talk about great destinations, and it would probably say that is fine. It is a big, calm, practical city of half a million people on the northern edge of the German hills, where the flat North German Plain begins to roll up toward the Deister and the Weser Uplands.
Read the complete Hannover write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Finish at Back to Hannover. That is the ride.
Hannover east edge → Peine fuel gate is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Peine fuel gate → Königslutter Elm road is 57 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Königslutter Elm road → Helmstedt old town stop is 19 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Helmstedt old town stop → Schöningen ridge is 15 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Schöningen ridge → Wolfenbüttel food stop is 41 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Wolfenbüttel food stop → Back to Hannover is 73 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Back to Hannover → Hannover south-east escape is 11 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Hannover south-east escape → Hildesheim fuel gate is 27 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Hildesheim fuel gate → Goslar old town edge is 60 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Goslar old town edge → Okertal bends is 8 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Okertal bends → Torfhaus high road is 12 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Torfhaus high road → Bad Harzburg food stop is 13 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Bad Harzburg food stop → Back to Hannover is 97 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.