The NRW online route planner extends into Belgium and the Netherlands

We have mentioned the excellent NRW route planner before, www.radroutenplaner.nrw.de/. You can use the planner to map routes thirty kilometres or so into those bits of Belgium and the Netherlands that border NRW. It makes planning trips along the Rhine, for example, easier.

E-Bike Hire in Cologne

Liebe-Bike, Hohe Straße 76, 51149 Köln, Porz, Ensen nearest underground station: Ensen Gilgaustraße offer six geared e-bikes of their own manufacture for €14 for two hours, €21 for four hours and €29 a day. The company will deliver bikes for a fee as along you order more than five bikes. A tour guide is also available.
T: +49 2203 120 20,  www.kölle-bike.de, info@kölle-bike.de.

River Rhine Cycle Route

The German Allgemeiner Deutscher Fahrrad-Club (a German cycling club) produces an annual guide to cycling in Germany in German unfortunately. We received our copy last week and I was interested to see that finally, at long last that the club has recognised that the Rhine Cycling route runs through six countries and it is possible to cycle in, for example France or Germany. In the past the information on the Rhine route suggested that there were no facilities in France, that the Rhine route started at Konstanz and finished at the Dutch border. There are serious amounts of information in English available under http://www.rhinecycleroute.eu/UK_front-page?set_language=en.
We are in process of rewriting our Rhine 2 book from Basel to Rotterdam as an e-book. If all goes well it should be available from Amazon and Smashwords by the middle of May, this year.

Bett und Bike

It is not good cycling weather at the moment. It is wet and cold, so we are in progress of updating the Romantic Road book. I am hopeful it will be out in ten days time.
I am glad to announce that the ADFC (the German cycling club) have finally, at long last brought out an English version of their excellent Bett und Bike (Bed and Bike) website: www.bettundbike.de. The idea behind the Bett und Bike website is that it lists accommodation where cyclists are welcomed as guests: They need only stay for  one night. The accommodation offers secure bike storage. (This is true in the main, though we have found two participants in the scheme in the last 20 years where our bikes were locked up in the open. It pays to take a lock with you.) There are drying facilities available. Simple tools are available for minor  repairs. For more major problems, your hosts know where the nearest bike shop is. Your hosts will have background information on the area on offer. Breakfasts are excellent and filling to give the cyclist a good start to the day.
The web site is much improved since it was necessary to search in German. However you do need to use German spellings of town and city names: Köln not Cologne, Hannover not Hanover and München not Munich. The federal states are given German names, so it's Bayern not Bavaria and Niedersachsen not Lower Saxony, for example.If you are searching a route then jot down the names of the towns you wish to stop in and extract the information that way, rather than using the route maps provided. The information you receive using the routes is in German.