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 compact southbound ride with culture stops and clean rural corners. A 139 km loop that starts and ends near Pattensen, about 2 h 37 of riding. On the way it passes Hildesheim, Fagus Factory Alfeld sight and Bodenwerder Weser stop. Duingen Hils road is the high point. The line favours views over speed.
South of Hannover the flat plain starts to fold, and the small town of Pattensen, on the Leine, marks the place where the ride leaves the city for the hills. The land here is the Calenberger Land, a fertile farming country of wheat and sugar beet, with big brick farmhouses and low ridges on the horizon. Beyond it rise the limestone ridges of the Leinebergland, the Ith and the Hils, long, forested crests with cliffs and old quarries, and they are the reason the ride exists.
Read the complete Hannover south gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hannover south is where the day begins. 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.
Hildesheim is the fuel stop for this leg. Next is Fagus Factory Alfeld sight.
The Fagus Factory is a shoe-last factory that changed the course of architecture, and it sits unassumingly beside the railway line in Alfeld, a small town on the Leine river. The buildings were designed by the young Walter Gropius, with Adolf Meyer, and built between 1911 and 1913 for Carl Benscheidt, a manufacturer who wanted a modern, light-filled factory. What they produced, with glass walls that wrap around the corners of the brick structure with no supporting pillar in the way, was one of the first buildings in the world to look genuinely modern, a forerunner of the Bauhaus that Gropius would found in 1919.
Read the complete Fagus Factory Alfeld sight write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
55 km in you reach Fagus Factory Alfeld sight. Next is Duingen Hils road.
The Hils is a modest range of wooded hills in southern Lower Saxony, and it offers some of the best quiet riding in the region. The roads run along ridges and through beech forest, with gentle, flowing bends, a decent surface, and views that open suddenly over the farmland of the Leine valley. It is a landscape that never quite makes a fuss, and for that reason it is a pleasure to ride, with almost no traffic on a weekday and the smell of damp leaves in the shade.
Read the complete Duingen Hils road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The high point of this section. Next is Bodenwerder Weser stop.
Bodenwerder is the home town of a man who was never quite able to tell the truth, and the town has made him a hero. Baron Münchhausen, Hieronymus Carl Friedrich von Münchhausen, was born here in 1720 and lived in the family manor beside the Weser, and as an old man he entertained dinner guests with fantastical tales of riding on a cannonball, pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair, and flying to the moon. A writer collected the stories, and the baron became a literary legend. The old manor is now the town hall and holds a museum, and a fountain shows him on his cannonball.
Read the complete Bodenwerder Weser stop write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Bodenwerder Weser stop sits at 111 km, about halfway. Next is Elze return road.
Elze is the sort of small town you only really know if you have been passed through it on the way home. It sits on the Leine river south of Hannover, in the gentle, folded country that Lower Saxony people call the Leinebergland, where a river valley, a railway and a main road all squeeze past one another between low wooded ridges. With about nine and a half thousand inhabitants, it has what a rider needs after a long day: fuel, a supermarket, a bakery and the kind of cafe where the coffee comes with a small biscuit and no commentary.
Read the complete Elze return road write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Elze return road comes up 138 km in. Next is back to Hannover south.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Hannover south gate write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back to Hannover south closes the day.
Use Hannover south gate → Hildesheim fuel gate as clean positioning. Keep it tidy, ignore impatient traffic and save the enthusiasm for the good road ahead. The value here is not drama; it is arriving at the riding section with space, fuel and concentration intact.
This Hildesheim fuel gate → Fagus Factory Alfeld sight 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.
Fagus Factory Alfeld sight → Duingen Hils road is the technical section. Hairpins, gradients and mixed traffic can stack up quickly; use low drama inputs, stay wide of centre lines and expect buses or riders appearing exactly where optimism says they will not.
This Duingen Hils road → Bodenwerder Weser stop 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.
Bodenwerder Weser stop → Elze return road can flow quickly, but only if you keep village limits and junction sightlines sacred. Fast connectors are where rides get untidy when fatigue creeps in.