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 118 km round trip from Frauenfeld - roughly 2 h 30 in the saddle. The stops in between: Wangen-Hinterhorn, Wollmatingen-Langenrain and back through Wangen-Hinterhorn. It crosses from Switzerland into Germany - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules.
Scenic road chapters
Grand Tour of Switzerland
This part of the ride is 33 km of Grand Tour of Switzerland.
Chapter facts
Length
33 km
Named road
Grand Tour of Switzerland
Grand Tour of Switzerland
For about 31 km this is Grand Tour of Switzerland, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it. Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast.
Chapter facts
Length
31 km
Named road
Grand Tour of Switzerland
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Egelsee
There is almost nothing to see at the Egelsee, and that is part of its charm. It is a small, reed-fringed bog lake in the rolling Thurgau countryside between Gachnang and Frauenfeld, and under its peat and mud lie the remains of a Neolithic lakeside settlement, timber piles and floor layers preserved for thousands of years because air never reached them. It is one of the many sites that make up the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps on the UNESCO list, and unlike the reconstructed villages you find elsewhere, this one has been left in the ground on purpose. Archaeologists consider the soggy earth the best museum there is.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Egelsee is where the day begins. Next is Wangen-Hinterhorn.
2. Wangen-Hinterhorn
When the water of the Untersee, the western arm of Lake Constance, was unusually low in the winter of 1853 to 1854, people around the Swiss and German shores noticed wooden posts sticking out of the mud. They were the remains of prehistoric pile dwellings, villages built on the lakeshore thousands of years ago, and the find sparked a wave of research and a craze for lake-dwelling romance across Europe. Wangen, on the German shore of the Untersee, was one of the first sites studied, and Wangen-Hinterhorn belongs to the World Heritage inscription for prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps, though there is nothing to see above the water.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Wangen-Hinterhorn comes up about 33 km into the recorded legs. Next is Wollmatingen-Langenrain.
3. Wollmatingen-Langenrain
Konstanz is the German city that sits on Switzerland's lap, so close to the border that the two towns, Konstanz and Kreuzlingen, run into each other with a fence in between. The old town lies on the narrows between the Obersee and the Untersee, the two halves of Lake Constance, where the Rhine leaves the lake, and it has one of the best preserved medieval centres in southern Germany. Its survival has a simple explanation: it was not bombed in the Second World War, partly because of its closeness to neutral Switzerland. In the early fifteenth century, it hosted the Council of Constance, which ended a split in the Catholic Church and condemned the reformer Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415.