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 177 km round trip from Trier - roughly 2 h 34 in the saddle. The stops in between: City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F, La place forte de Longwy and back through City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F. It crosses Germany, Luxembourg and France - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules.
For about 49 km this is Luxembourg Mullerthal 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.
39 km on Luxembourg Mullerthal Route.
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 is where the day begins. Next is City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F.
Luxembourg City is built on a rocky plateau above the deep, green valleys of the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers, and for centuries it was one of the most powerful fortresses in Europe, nicknamed the Gibraltar of the North. Spanish, French, Austrian and Prussian armies all held it, and each added to its walls, bastions and tunnels. In 1867, after an international treaty, most of the fortifications were dismantled, but enough remains to make the old quarters and fortifications a UNESCO World Heritage site, inscribed in 1994.
Read the complete City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F comes up about 49 km into the recorded legs. 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.
about 88 km into the recorded legs you reach La place forte de Longwy. Next is back through City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F, late in the day. Next is Barbara Baths.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Barbara Baths write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Barbara Baths. That is the ride.
Barbara Baths → City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F is 49 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F → 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 → back through City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through City of Luxembourg: its Old Quarters and F → Barbara Baths is 49 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.