Yet more hire bikes in Rhineland Palatinate

The heat recently (35°C) has put us off doing any serious cycling though we did have a day out on Sunday cycling the new Vom Riesling zum Zander route from the Deutsche Weinstraße just north of Bad Bergzabern across to the Rhine. There were wine fests, farmers offering local produce and restaurants with Riesling and Zander dishes along the route's 35km. Zander is freshwater fish known as pike-perch in English and has a firm white flesh. It tastes excellent.

We also discovered a local bike hire company called fahrradverleih-suedpfalz.de. The company offers the full spectrum of bicycles apart from tandems: Road bikes, touring bikes, city bikes, trailers, MTBs and pedelec electrobikes at very reasonable prices. If you are thinking of going cycling starting in or around Speyer or Karlsruhe and don't wish to transport your bike to the Fatherland then check it out. The company has a free telephone number: 0800 22 88 440 (in Germany) or drop it a line at Fahrradverleih-Suedpfalz.de, Mühlweg 2, 76771 Hördt, Germany

The local bike shop

Like most of us I am all in favour of local bike shops (LBS), as are the national cycling clubs of Europe. When I write local I mean the kind of shop where the owner stands behind the counter, rather than the big sheds out on the bypass. Although all of these guys face serious competition from the Internet shops. I think we are slightly more logical than some of the national cycling clubs who profess to support their LBS, but offer a link to a major online shop on their websites.

Neustadt-Speyer Route

Last year we began our exploration of day excursions by bike in Rheinland Pfalz, the next province over on the west bank of the Rhine. We cycle into Mannheim (12km) then take a local railway usually to Neustadt an der Weinstrasse. Our over 60 ticket, which costs around 1€ per day allows us and our bikes to travel at no extra cost after the morning rush hour. Often we take other connections from Neustadt a.d. Weinstrasse to reach further into the Pfalz but this time we cycled out to Speyer (about 35km). Neustadt is a vineyard town on gentle slopes at the edge of the fault line marking the Rhine Rift Valley. Though they often moan about prices and problems, caused by anything from hailstorms to droughts and EU bureaucracy, most vintners make a reasonable living and the small towns have attractive buildings suggesting prosperity for centuries. Despite the media gloom-makers, true to form Neustadt's downtown area was marked by several major building projects, necessitating the removal or destruction of bike route signs. Away from the station we headed off in the general direction of Speyer and soon found ourselves trapped in pleasant countryside on the wrong side of an expressway (see first picture). After the usual cursing we found a bridge over the expressway (there nearly always is one in Germany, if only for the local farmers) and after a little thrashing in the woods on very local trails we soon hit our required NW-SP cycleway. The surface was hard gravel and led us through mixed woods, beloved by a wide variety of birds according to display boards put up by the local bird fanciers. The birds themselves trilled and sang, light winds kept us cool as we exchanged woods for fields and moved gradually eastwards. Occasionally we had to cross proper roads but traffic was sparse. A wooden shelter came in handy for our picnic stop and we had just finished as a tractor appeared to turn rows of cut grass ready for baling. We continued along the southern margin of the extensive strip of woodland lying east-west between Speyer and Neustadt. Approaching Dudenhofen we passed by a major supplier of wood for stoves and then into the little town itself, quietly dozing in the lunch-break. The fields around Speyer grow potatoes, sweetcorn and sugar beet and the open view revealed the towers and spires of its cathedral and numerous churches. A short distance beside the expressway, then a sharp left turn brought us beneath the highway and into the little city perched on a slope above the Rhine. Speyer is delightful, lies on the pilgrim route to Santiago de la Compostela, has a lovely main street with all the restaurants, ice cream parlours and historic buildings anyone could wish for, but on this occasion we just headed for the station and the S-bahn back to Mannheim. The clouds were gathering for a storm.

Cycling is booming in Germany

We are neither of us keen shoppers. Maybe it's the Northern English folk memories of the Depression in the 1930s - before our time, but we knew plenty of people who had lived through this. It is difficult to say. However we go to our local shopping centre (mall), Rhein-Neckar-Zentrum most weeks to visit Aldi and Bauhaus, a DIY store. The Zentrum does attempt to draw visitors in by having special exhibitions from time to time. Yesterday we visited an exhibition of the tourist attractions of the city of Schwerin, capital of the federal province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. One of the principle pillars of this campaign is cycling. The tourist information package for the city comes with a cycle touring map giving suggestions for four cycle tours between 30 and 75 kilometre long and details of a bus service that will carry the tourists' bikes when they do not feel like cycling on.
It would appear in the economic crisis more and more Germans are turning to cycling for holiday and leisure activities. The bicycle touring business is booming. In 2009 in Germany alone cycle tourists generated 22 million overnight stays and spent around 3.87 billion (thousand million) Euros (Deutschen Tourismusverband DTV). The ADFC (German Cycling Club) has noticed that cycle tourism is bucking a declining trend for holiday making in the popular cycling regions and on long distance cycle routes. As an example, hotels on the Ruhr Valley Cycle Route showed a growth in bookings of 13% in 2009 whereas hotel bookings declined in the rest of the Ruhr by 2.5% in the same period. Biking is popular for group, bus, and club excursions, as well as for business and club events. This interest is being matched by the willingness of the local authorities to invest in cycle ways and information. (The top photograph shows a group of tourists relaxing in the town square of Feuchtwangen during on of the celebrations to mark 60 years of the Romantic Road. The lower photograph shows a new information table on the Danube Valley Cycle Way. )
This trend has not gone unnoticed by the organisers of the 36th International Coach Tourism Federation Workshop in Cologne from 27th to 29th July 2010. Its major theme is Cycle Touring. Exhibitors include bus operators, regional tourist authorities and the ADFC.

Tal Total

We visited the car free day (Tal Total) on the roads on the left and right banks of the Rhine last Sunday between Rüdesheim and Koblenz. It was good fun especially after 15:00 when all the football fans had left to watch the game. For much of the day we were cycling on fairly empty roads with all sorts of exotic machinery. We are normally no great fans of these open days as you can walk or bike on the participants' heads.
We could have picnicked in the middle of the road. We took a train from Bingen to Worms and cycled home. We were told in Mainz on the HBf over the loudspeakers that the German team had won, but even so where somewhat surprised in Worms to find ourselves mixed up with a parade of honking cars and idiots who remonstrated with us for not flying a German flag. However once out the town centre life quietened down so we could return home on quiet roads and paths through the forest to Viernheim.

High Noon

Germany too has been hit by waves of the patriotic flying Black, Red and Gold flags on their vehicles. There are those who wish to hedge their bets and so fly a German flag on one side of the vehicle and a foreign flag - Swiss or Italian on the other.
Personally we are not bothered by football, but have noticed that the streets of Viernheim before a big match resemble the small town in the film of "High Noon". Everywhere is empty. Nobody stirs. Then the match starts and we are able to work out the course of the game by the groans and cheers, If the German team scores a major goal there are rockets and other fireworks too.
What this has to do with cycling or even cycle touring, you may ask? Well, there is a new 800 km cycle route in North Rhine Westphalia called Die Deutsche Fußball Route (The German Football Route) running from Aachen to Bielefeld visiting the stadiums of some of Germany's best known clubs.

Gradient or gravel? More pictures

Left picture shows bikeway being relaid with cobbles - in Belgium, after heavy rain.
Other picture - deep sand on canalside trail - Belgium, very hard work

Gradient or gravel?

Many cyclists, especially those new to the game or returnees after a break get excited or alarmed about slopes or steepness, often regardless of whether these are uphill or down dale. Of course gradient is relevant when planning a tour and sometimes it pays to consider a route in two directions. Steep short climbs followed by long dreamy descents may be much better than riding the route the other way round. However, in our opinion riding surfaces are almost as important, to speed, general comfort and enjoyment. Even the simplest of bikes can cope with very different surfaces, when need be and mountain bikers relish bunny hopping over boulders, however when on tour most of us want to reach our destination safely and in time for a beer before bed. With provision of designated routes for cyclists growing and the costs of laying and maintaining these routes clearly important for local authorities, we’ve put together our experience of different types of surface. Though there is a school of thought that suggests that we cyclists should be grateful to be allowed to exist at all and to ride along the cast off shoulders of roads thanking our lucky stars, we always hope for improvements.
In the best possible world, top of our list comes the high speed metalled surface we’ve encountered along the upper Rhine, where the cycleway is combined with river flood protection work. At the bottom comes loose sand, an unfriendly surface that often tips the rider off as the wheels stop. Our local woods, growing on glacial sand dunes, feature several of these Sahara practice runs though only for short stretches. In between is a whole gamut of broken or decayed metalled surfaces, bouncy runs across tree roots and the various problems associated with Messrs. Gravel, Pebbles & Co. Over the years we’ve ridden touring bikes and Brompton folders across almost everything including freshly blasted rocks, high in the Swiss Alps, especially interesting after rain and long distances on rounded river pebbles newly dredged out of the nearby Scheldt in Belgium. The latter are frustrating and wearing on legs, seat and arms despite shock absorbers or springs and can slow speeds down as much as a headwind. Another horror concerns maintenance when pea gravel or small stones can be dumped on trails to a depth of several centimetres and simply flattened with a grader and lightweight roller. Without warning the cyclist passes from hard old gravel to unconsolidated track, on which headway is very difficult. In wet conditions some of these gravel surfaces become sticky or glue like so the rider’s thighs bulge to achieve a measly 8 km/h. So it was for us along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in the wake of the rains of Hurricane Fran some years ago.
The original Paris-Roubaix race was rightly feared for the hazardous cobble sections, now the organisers have difficulty in finding a few kilometres of motor roads with cobbles to include in the route. However the cyclist on the Flanders bike route may find plenty of these surfaces to relish, including some being re-laid when we were there some years ago. At the top of the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland a sign warns of the danger of riding down the section of cobbled road, designated a National Monument, unless your bike has front shocks. Ours hadn’t but we made it without real problems.
Roads too have many hazards from the much documented grids to cracks and potholes and beyond to kerbs that topple unbalanced riders and even melting tar that dapples with black spots. A new version of this was a thin layer of tar sprayed on roads in Bavaria one summer. It was designed to seal old and new surfaces together and allowed us to leave our tread impressions to be fossilised but resulted in our sticky tyres collecting many small stones, extremely hard to dislodge. Most of the surfaces mentioned are just cause for delay or exasperation but some are dangerous and possibly fatal. We’ve rarely been defeated, thanks to determination and low gearing, and have even made headway over the dirty ice remains of avalanches lingering over remote trails in the Alps until late summer. We thought we’d coped with most vegetation problems, like overgrown hedges where roses and brambles try to pluck bicyclists from their saddles to high grasses from which the rider emerges like a figure in Monet’s paintings, growing out of the trail. However, a farmer along the Leinetal had clearly delighted in arranging his swaths of drying hay directly along an already narrow clay path. Our Bromptons triumphed, as ever, but it was a drag.
A quick glance at the Internet has not revealed any standard surfaces for bike trails in either Europe or North America. A recent wet day on new cycleways along the Danube in Germany suggested that the preferred gravel chip’n mud left much to be desired and most it was left on our gear. Bikes, packs and riders needed hosing off at the end of the day. Is it beyond engineers/road makers to suggest cheap materials that function well in wet and dry conditions, that give reasonable traction and don’t inflict too much damage in a tumble? No doubt other cyclists have their own stories of horror surfaces or perhaps solutions to offer?

Instructions

We find it is a good idea to take instructions for items like hub or derailleur gears, because at the critical point we forget the vital step to fix a maladjusted gear. We pop photocopies of the instructions in a sealable plastic bag to take with us on tour. Something that is worth not forgetting in our experience are the instructions to recalibrate the cycle computer after a battery change.

Karl Drais

Karl Drais was the inventor of the Laufmaschine or velocipede, the earliest form of the bicycle, initially without pedals. His first reported ride, from the Schloss in Mannheim to the "Schwetzinger Relaishaus" (a coaching inn, located in what is now "Rheinau", a district of Mannheim) took place on June 12, 1817.
The city of Mannheim in cooperation with the ADFC (a German cycling club) has laid out a new cycle route from the centre of Mannheim to Rheinau and onwards following Karl Drais's original test run. On Saturday June 10th 2010 the ADFC is organising a cycle event to open the cycle route starting from the Schloss in Mannheim at 12:00 along part of the route and finishing at the Stadler cycle shop in Neckarau, another district of Mannheim. The route has yet to be equipped with signposts, however this year is the 225th anniversary of his birth and 10th June is a Saturday.
We will be there (DV) and will report.

Saving money with Deutsche Bahn

Obviously if you are prepared to book early enough there are some good bargains to be had from German Railways. The 19 and/or 39 Euro tickets to travel the length and breadth of Germany are well worth checking out on www.bahn.de. However be warned there are not always many tickets available for some trains and you can forget Fridays.
There are other bargains available from the Bahn however:
The Länder tickets. Each of the German provinces offers a ticket valid after 09:00 from Monday to Fridays and all day on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays on local and regional trains. The disadvantages are 1) that the regional trains stop at more stations and are therefore somewhat slower. 2) you might have to change more often. However these trains take bicycles.
Schönes-Wochende-Ticket costs 37 Euro for up to 5 people. With this ticket it is possible to travel from one end of Germany in Konstanz at 8 am to Flensburg changing 8 times and getting in to Flensburg just before 2 am the next morning or west east from Saarbrücken to Görlitz starting just before 8 am and arriving at 9:30 pm changing only 7 times. They are slow journeys, but very cheap.

Cycle events

We are all supposed to have fifteen minutes of fame these days and I suppose ours came in early May. On 8 May the town of Viernheim held an event to encourage both children and adults to take more exercise. The ADFC took part. Judith and I were invited to the press conference. Afterwards one of the reporters attending the meeting noticed our Bromptons. We had the usual discussion: "No, they are no harder to cycle than a normal bike. "Yes, we are very satisfied with the bikes." He waited for us outside the meeting and took a quick photograph of us both and a folded and an unfolded Brompton. On 5 May we opened our local paper "Südhessen Morgen" and found that picture accompanying an article advertising the event on the following Saturday.

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.

Rescue points

Both of us suffer from untreatable ‘Cartomania’, a little researched complaint involving the collection of maps, large, small, old and new. So yesterday I saw a new 1:30 000 cycle touring map of our local area and immediately succumbed to temptation. A couple of months ago, after the Neil, had had a chance to browse the Südliches Ried:Bergstrasse/Rhein-Neckar produced by MeKi Landkarten GmbH (www.meki-landkarten.de) (well it was his birthday), I got my chance too to see what was new. There were our old favourites south into Mannheim or northeast towards Bensheim and the Odenwald, together with new sections of longer distance cycle routes like the World Heritage Route (Welterbe-Radtour) as well as clearer information about cycle possibilities on the fringes of our day tour stamping ground like Ludwigshafen. New local train lines which take bikes, either free or for the price of a child’s ticket, have brought these more distant locations into consideration. We live in the Rhine Rift Valley, a roughly 40 km wide lowland sandwiched between the hills of the Pfalzerwald on the west and the Odenwald on the east. North of the big cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen it is basically an area of farms, small towns and forests, providing many cycling opportunities. People do use some routes as part of a commute to a station or employer and many others cycle in their free time. What is fairly immediately striking as the map is opened out is the area of forest or woodland. Our three local provinces of Hesse, where we live, Baden-Würtemberg to the east and south and Rheinland-Pfalz across the Rhine to the west are all much more wooded than most of the UK. The forests are not on a US or Canadian scale, true, but there are many kilometres of routes through the forests, cool in summer and offering shelter in autumn and winter. Some forests are almost all coniferous, others incorporate section of red oak, beech or chestnut trees. Most of the forests occupy stretches of glacial sands or dunes and were originally used for hunting by monks or local dukes in the middle ages. Now they provide timber, habitats for birds and other wildlife such as deer and ever increasing numbers of wild boar, plus of course green lungs for city dwellers. The cycle ways follow mostly gravelled roads made for foresters, often laid out as a grid and where GPS devices frequently cease to function. Route finding can be difficult and if there’s a diversion (timber operations, mud baths, fallen trees) we’ve often struggled to get back on track. We’ve occasionally speculated on forest rides in the dusk or in definitely spooky darkness about what to do when truly lost, ill or injured. Now we know that in Hesse at least all wooded areas and some other remote sites have a series of rescue points, marked on the ground and on large scale maps. In situ these are signs with a white cross on a green background with location and a number. On the MeKi Landkarten they are shown by a green oval with a number. These spots are known to local police, ambulance and emergency services and can be reached by their vehicles. Initially they were set up in case of accidents to workers in the forests but may be used to rescue the public generally. ADFC advice to any group with a rider ill or injured is to use a mobile phone to contact number 112 to alert the emergency service and give location of nearest rescue point. If necessary a party member can reach the rescue point and guide emergency services to the injured party. Outside mountain regions where rescue kit may be found at huts, passes or survey points this idea was new to me and may be of interest to others who may cycle in remote areas in the UK where access is difficult or to people who actually operate emergency services. Location by mobile phone has been used to rescue many people in difficulty I know but knowing an access point by road may also be useful.

Life is unfair?

It is fairly obvious that life is not always fair, particularly to us cyclists. We went to the southern Pfalz yesterday and drove from Landau to Bad Bergzabern. The road is hilly and climbs over a series of crests with a short climb up to each one. There is a cycleway running alongside the road. Now, whereas the road runs through a cutting at the top of each crest, the cycleway is along the rim of the cutting meaning that the poor cyclist has to do more work than the other powered road users. It could be said that it is better for us on human-powered vehicles to work harder: We will be fitter. That the cars need to climb less is good as well: They give out less carbon dioxide, but it still seems unfair as you pant over the brow of the hill.

The Argonne Forest

Last Saturday but one we had a day off from our labours and joined a tour to some First World War battlefields in Northern France. An American acquaintance of ours, Deputy Director of the local US High School, is an amateur military historian and in fact his grandfather served there, on a gun battery commanded by Harry Truman. The area we visited was close to where we had cycled in the Moselle valley previously so we knew there were many remnants of the war, but we knew nothing of this particular offensive where the French were relieved by fresh US troops under the command of General Pershing, in an area NW of Verdun. We set off by bus when it was still dark, after getting up at 4.30 am. It was a bus trip for the educationalists in Mannheim and Heidelberg. The whole trip was planned like a military operation and once on the bus we were immersed in briefings about the war's origins, videos and with handouts. It was all very interesting and our friend knows so much about the various battles and heroic incidents, people involved etc which made it all the more real. Most of the route was on motorway and at a service station close to the battlefield, there was a great white marble monument to those who fought, on both sides. Underneath were two inscriptions - one giving the names of the first two men killed in 1914 on this battlefield - one French and one German - obviously young men and then another, more recent about the deaths of the last Frenchman and the last German to have fought there. Both died in 2008, one aged 110 and one aged 108! Quite amazing.
We then left the motorway and continued on tiny roads in our giant pink bus, up and down dale mostly in heavy, pouring rain. We couldn't see much of the surrounding countryside but still no one complained as we clambered up muddy paths and inspected immense holes where mines had exploded close to the opposing trenches, then moved on the examine other memorials and places where individual actions had taken place. Of course the whole thing is very sad, especially since we know that only a few years later the whole mess happened again and still politicians are sending young people off to wars. Fortunately we then had a break for a meal in a tiny French village where by a miracle they were able to accommodate and feed a party of 40, on roast chicken and salad with a glass of wine and an ice dessert. We didn't know most of the other folks, American teachers and ancillary staff at the American schools nearby, but they made us feel welcome.
Whilst we were inside the rain stopped and the sun even came out for a while before we managed to get out of the bus again for our longest walk in Châtel Chéhéry a tiny village. Here Sgt York managed to thwart a German ambush, killing a number of soldiers and then taking 132 Germans prisoner without further losses. Our leader had become fascinated by this story and had visited the area frequently to try to pinpoint exactly where the events occurred - this was very close to Armistice Day 1918 so it is almost 100 years ago now. We stood under our umbrellas in rain so heavy it was almost like the machine gun fire he was telling us about - most of us really not bothered about whether the action had happened here or half a mile up the road, but we drank a toast in brandy to all the brave men on both sides, drawn by chance into these battles, that came to an end literally just a few days later. Then it was back to the bus, in the warm and dry again and eventually home again by 10.45 pm. Though we cannot say that the visit was enjoyable, in the sense that the events were a pleasure we nonetheless do think it important to remember what happened and the people involved… lest we forget.
We ate lunch in the Le Grand Monarque Restaurant in Varenne en Argonne. There is now a move by the local authorities to encourage cycling and the area with its minor roads and historical connections is a good place to cycle. However if you are tempted to visit the Meuse area of Lorraine (www.tourisme-meuse.com) do not pick up any shells or munitions in the woods. There is still a lot around. Some of it is still live and some of it contains Mustard Gas, used by both sides in 1918. If all goes well I think we will return to the area.

Radreisemarkt (Cycle Touring Fair) Frankfurt IV

The Liebliches Taubertal (Gentle Tauber Valley) team were represented as it has been since the cycle touring fair started. We cannot remember an event without them anyway. What I like about these characters is their ability to find new cycle routes to connect the routes in their area with those in the areas round about. The first route was the 100km Klassiker the classic Tauber Valley Route, which connects Wertheim on the Main with Tothenburg ob der Tauber through Tauberbischofsheim, Lauda, Bad Mergentheim, Weikersheim, Creglingen and Rottingen. This was followed by the Sportive, the sporty Tauber Valley Route. This is a somewhat hillier variation that forms a loop around the Tauber valley and combined with the classic route makes up a trip of about 260km. The classic route has been upgraded or extended by the addition of a number of loops entitled die Erlebnistouren, which can be loosely translated as the Adventure Tours. The links to the south and the Jagst valley were next exploited in the Hohenloher Residenzweg (Hohenlohe Stately House Route) which visits a number of relatively unknown but quite interesting noble piles. The next was the Main-Tauber-Fränkisher Radachter (537 km) which follows part of the Tauber route before climbing over into the Main valley to follow the river downstream through Würzburg to Freudenberg and then returns to the Tauber via the Odenwald. This is a serious route. The latest routes are food and drink orientated: The Wein-Route in the Main and Tauber Valleys and the Grünkern-Route. Grünkern is dried unripe Dinkel (spelt) grain which was used initially after a wet summer in 1660 prevented full ripening of the grain and the unripe grain was dried in an attempt to make it edible. It was not much use as grain for bread, but added to soups it helped stave off hunger. It is now used in soups and in fritters and eaten as a delicacy in its own right. The hilly route runs through pleasant countryside through a number of interesting little villages.
Our "Romantic Road from Würzburg to Füssen" describes the Tauber Valley between Tauberbischofsheim and Rothenburg odT and can be obtained from us (www.bergstrassebikebooks.com) and the Romantic Road Tourist Authority (www.romantischestrasse.de).

Radreisemarkt (Cycle Touring Fair) Frankfurt III

Saarland is one of Germany's smallest provinces, on the eastern border to France and Luxembourg, but it offers over 700 km of signposted cycleway. The province was represented at the Frankfurt fair and we were most impressed by the progress made over the last few years. We enquired about the Saarlorlux Route a circular route running through Saarland, Lorraine and Luxembourg, which is one those routes we look at from time to time and think it would be fun to do. It still is as long as one is prepared to navigate without specific signposting in Lorraine. There must be something about France that makes it difficult to organise signposting. The signposting is already in place in Saarland and Luxembourg. It was hoped as well to offer cycling holidays with pre-booked accommodation with baggage transfer. This too is proving difficult in France. However Saarland and Luxemburg have a network of cycleways crisscrossing the province and the Grand Duchy. One can book cycling holidays there. Contact the Saarland Tourist Office by eMail at info (at) tz-s.de or the Luxembourg Tourist Office (eMail: info (at) visitluxembourg.lu.

Radreisemarkt (Cycle Touring Fair) Frankfurt II

We met Monique Goldschmit again at the fair. She runs an interesting company in Luxembourg called Velosophie. The company offers a range of maps, books, bags, bells, safety accessories, and cyclist's greeting and postcards. In addition Monique leads and plans reasonably priced luxury cycle tours in Luxembourg with a leader, luggage transfer, and a wine tasting. She also teaches cycling to adults in Luxembourg. If you ever fancied cycling in this fascinating albeit small country, then check out the Velosophie website, which is in German and French, but an eMail in English to velosophie(at)pt.lu will bring a reply in English. (Replace the "(at)" by the more conventional symbol.)

Radreisemarkt (Cycle Touring Fair) Frankfurt I

Every year about this time the Frankfurt branch of the ADFC the German cycling club organises its Radreisemesse. If you live in or near Frankfurt it is worth popping along and paying 2 Euros to visit the stands set by various largely German tourist offices, the ADFC itself, bike shops and tour companies. We will report over the next few days or weeks about what we saw and what we think is interesting.
If you want to hire a bike, a pedelec, a trike or even a tandem in Frankfurt am Main then take a look at Mosch.spezialradreisen if you can read German or drop an eMail to post(at)spezialradreisen.de. This company organises cycle tours all over the world, but when the bikes are not needed for tours you can hire bikes from it. They seemed like a pleasant bunch of folks and their trikes: HP are top drawer machines.