Bicycles in the Stoewer Museum in Wald-Michaelbach

Stoewer was a small motor manufacturer in Stettin (now Szczecin in Western Poland). The company is best known for its technically advanced cars. However it also built sewing machines, typewriters and bicycles. Examples of all these can be seen in the Stoewer-Museum, Michelstraße 1, Wald-Michelbach, Hesse, Germany. The museum is only open between 2 and 5 pm on the first Sunday of each month. Wald-Michelbach can be easily reached by car or by bus from Weinheim, Bergstraße. More information is available under www.stoewer-museum.de .

Bike Hire in Mannheim and Middle Hesse

We've just updated our Bicycle Touring Europe website with a chapter on bike hire in middle Hesse (NE of Frankfurt am Main) and an addition to the bike hire possibilities in Mannheim: http://www.bicycletouringeurope.eu/cycling/useful-stuff/bike-hire/germany/index.html.

Rails to Trails in Germany: The Bahnradweg Hessen

One of the good things about travel fairs like the CMT in Stuttgart is that it introduces you to areas that you have completely overlooked in the past. We had an interesting ten minutes or so chatting to a young woman on the Wetterau stand/booth. Where? It is a hilly area NE of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The BahnRadweg Hessen runs from Hanau NE to Fulda and Bad Hersfeld. The route offers about 400km of cycleways in two loops in combination with other routes. The route is based on old railway lines and so there are fewer steep climbs than you would expect, or so I am told. This route is on our list for a tryout in April or May this year and we will report back.
The route runs through the Rhön and Vogelsberg Mittelgebirge (hill regions). There are a number of interesting towns and sights on the route:

• Hanau with its connections to the Brothers Grimm
• Keltenwelt in Glauburg, a museum, archeological park and research centre
• Gelnhausen with its historic half timbered houses, moated castle and churches
• Lauterbach - half timbered Altstadt (old city heart)
• Schlitz - castles and towers and half timbered houses
• Fulda with its baroque cathedral and residences
• Bad Hersfeld with Germany's oldest cast bell, a local museum and the ruins of the biggest early churches in the world
• Point Alpha Memorial - on the former DDR-FRG border. This about four km from the route and well worth visiting. 

There are a number of spa towns on the route, so it's not all history and landscape, there are large scale swimming multi-pool parks with steam baths and saunas in Bad Hersfeld, Bad Salzschlirf, Baden-Allensdorf and Herbstein. All of these spa towns have active programmes of concerts and events.

Half timbered houses in Lauterbach (Foto Region Vogelsberg Touristik)

Milseburg Tunnel (Foto Region Vogelsberg Touristik) 

Underway on the Bahnradweg (Foto Region Vogelsberg Touristik)

Ramblers' Holidays are offering trips to the Rhine Valley

I was amazed and amused this morning to get a newsletter from Ramblers' Holidays - the commercial end of the British Ramblers' Association. We have had a number of holidays with the Ramblers. All of them were good. Some were better than others. The newsletter was enclosed with a brochure on cruising and walking which was binned very rapidly. I have no desire to have to pack a penguin suit to eat dinner.
However the newsletter had an article by Martin Hesp, the Senior Features Editor of the Western Morning News about a holiday in Rüdesheim where he praises walking and cycling in the Rhine Gorge. We have been pushing the advantages of holidays in Germany for well over twenty five years: Prices are cheaper than in France. More people speak English. The food comes in large portions, but is very similar to British tastes. The wine is reasonably priced and much underrated in Britain. The beer is wonderful. There are excellent networks of cycle routes, backed up by good public transport.
Thanks Ramblers!
You can get a lot of background information about cycling in Germany by downloading our Cycling in Europe guide. If you get a taste for cycling in the Rhine Valley then check out our
"Following the Rhine gently upstream…" or "Riesling Route" shown on the right. The new version of "Rhine II" should be out by October, if all goes well.

Lorsch

We went up to Lorsch (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) last Saturday to visit a bicycle event organised by the town and the ADFC. The event was the usual mixture of an ADFC information stand, a second hand bike sale, a new bike hire company in Lorsch, a map sales stand, a sport club that runs a section for younger people wanting to learn how to do cycle acrobatics and a cycle proficiency test circuit. this kind of event happens fairly often in German towns, but what was somewhat unusual was that the town's development agency is actively supporting cycling as a way of encouraging tourism.