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 319 km round trip from Steckborn - roughly 5 h 02 in the saddle. The stops in between: Winkel, Egolzwil 3 and back through Winkel. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 950 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It crosses from Germany into Switzerland - carry ID and check vignette or toll rules.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 73 km this is Grand Tour of Switzerland, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
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.
Read the complete Wangen-Hinterhorn write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Wangen-Hinterhorn is where the day begins. Next is Winkel.
Under the calm surface of Lake Zurich, just off the shore at Erlenbach, lie the remains of villages that people built here more than five thousand years ago. The site called Winkel is one of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, a UNESCO site of more than a hundred settlements, and here, as elsewhere on the lake, archaeologists diving in the shallow water have found wooden piles, pottery, tools and food remains preserved in the mud. There is nothing to see from the shore, only the water and the reeds, but it is fascinating to think that the people who farmed and fished here in the Neolithic chose the same sunny slope that, thousands of years later, would become known as the Gold Coast.
Read the complete Winkel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Winkel comes up about 73 km into the recorded legs. Next is Egolzwil 3.
Archaeologists named a whole Neolithic culture after Egolzwil, a small village in the canton of Lucerne, because the settlements found in the Wauwiler Moos, a former lake turned into peat bog, revealed a way of life older than anything else known in the region at the time. Egolzwil 3, one of these sites, was a village of farmers who lived on the shore of a small lake over six thousand years ago, and it counts as one component of UNESCO's inscription of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps. The lake was drained in the nineteenth century to create farmland, and the remains were preserved in the wet peat.
Read the complete Egolzwil 3 write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 160 km into the recorded legs you reach Egolzwil 3. Next is back through Winkel.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Winkel write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Winkel, late in the day. Next is Wangen-Hinterhorn.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Wangen-Hinterhorn write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Wangen-Hinterhorn. That is the ride.
Wangen-Hinterhorn → Winkel is 73 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Winkel → Egolzwil 3 is 87 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Egolzwil 3 → back through Winkel is 87 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Winkel → Wangen-Hinterhorn is 73 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.