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.
East out, lake air in, traffic noise gone. Out of Strausberg and back again: 97 km, roughly 1 h 55 in the saddle. The stops in between: Buckow and Schermützelsee, Neuhardenberg palace plain, Oderbruch open-road air and Müncheberg window.
This part of the ride is 16 km of Strausberg lakes edge → Buckow and Schermützelsee.
Strausberg has two things you do not often find together: a long, beautiful lake and an extremely unusual railway. The Straussee stretches several kilometres through the town, with a promenade, a small passenger ferry that crosses it in a few minutes, and wooded shores that make you forget that Berlin is just beyond. The little ferry is a pleasure in itself, a cheap and slightly absurd way to cross water.
Read the complete Strausberg lakes edge write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Strausberg lakes edge sits at 0 km, early in the day. Next is Buckow and Schermützelsee.
Buckow tends to be remembered for one house. In 1952 the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel acquired a modest villa on the shore of the Schermützelsee, with a garden running down to the water, and used it as a summer retreat until Brecht's death in 1956. It is now a small museum, set among old trees, and the rooms keep a sense of the plain, slightly austere taste of its owners. Brecht wrote the Buckow Elegies here, short poems of great simplicity, looking at the lake and the trees.
Read the complete Buckow and Schermützelsee write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Buckow and Schermützelsee comes up about 16 km into the recorded legs. Next is Neuhardenberg palace plain.
The Oderbruch is a landscape made by a king's order. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great had the marshy valley of the Oder drained and diked, turning a swamp into some of the richest farmland in Prussia, and he invited settlers from across Europe to farm it. The villages that sprang up have a regular layout, with a single long street and a church in the middle, and the fields run in straight lines to a flat horizon.
Read the complete Neuhardenberg palace plain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 34 km into the recorded legs you reach Neuhardenberg palace plain. Next is Oderbruch open-road air.
Open sky is the signature of the Oderbruch, and Letschin sits in the middle of it. This is a polder, a stretch of marshland along the Oder that Frederick the Great had drained in the 1740s and 1750s, moving the river into a new channel and settling farmers from across Europe on the reclaimed land. The result is a flat, fertile plain, crossed by dykes and drainage ditches, with farms laid out in rows and a huge horizon.
Read the complete Oderbruch open-road air write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Oderbruch open-road air, about halfway. Next is Müncheberg fuel window.
Müncheberg sits on the old trade road between Berlin and the Oder, the route that later became the Reichsstraße 1, running from Aachen all the way to East Prussia. Today it is the B1, still carrying freight and holidaymakers through the middle of the town, but beyond the main road the town is quiet. About seven thousand people live here, and it is a reliable place for fuel, with stations on the main road and supermarkets within a short distance.
Read the complete Müncheberg fuel window write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Next is Back to Strausberg.
Strausberg is the last proper town before Berlin turns into Brandenburg, and it knows how to be useful. It sits on the shore of a long lake, the Straussee, about thirty kilometres east of the capital, with the S-Bahn running straight in, and about twenty-six thousand people live here. The medieval centre kept a stretch of its town wall and the brick gothic Marienkirche, and the little ferry across the lake, the Strausberg ferry, is one of the nicest short crossings in the region. The town also runs one of the smallest tram networks in Germany, a single line that has served for a century.
Read the complete Strausberg write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 97 km.
This Buckow and Schermützelsee → Neuhardenberg palace plain 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.
Neuhardenberg palace plain → Oderbruch open-road air is the reward section in Berlin. Look through the bends, use legal pull-offs for photos and keep a little margin for tractors, cyclists and damp shade. The best ride here is smooth, not noisy.
This Oderbruch open-road air → Müncheberg fuel window 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.