Cycling across Germany

[steveindenmark]

The weather is very hit and miss.

We had a lovely Spring last year and then a Summer that was not so good but a few days in October was nice enough to swim in the sea. Winter has been very mild until the last week or so and it is down to -23 in Denmark but will start warming up now.

September should be the better month but I got caught in 40cm of snow in Switzerland last September.

Bring good waterproofs and lots of suncream.

Steve

 

[Andy in Sig]

If you were heading more or less south of Berlin, I suspect that you could probably get to around Leipzig without seeing significant hills. That would be a good place from which to get a train to e.g. Passau (on the Danube) or Bamberg (a beautiful place, worth a day's stay and which would set you up for the River Main route to Frankfurt. The Neckar route is OK but personally I prefer the Main. Another possibility would be Passau to Donauwörth on the Danube, then the last bit of the Romantische Strasse to Würzburg and the Main route to Frankfurt.

The whole thing is really determined by your daily mileage. I reckon with about 100 km a day when on my own but I suppose with kids you have to reckon on somewhere between 40 - 60 km a day. 5 weeks does, however, mean that you should cover a lot of ground. The River Weser route is very family friendly. For instance you could go west from Berlin to Hamburg, then Bremen and then down the Weser, then the Fulda and then take a train to Bamberg and then do the Main. Why not get a big topographical map of Germany, decide on what look like interesting routes and then check out the towns on the routes on the internet? I think the key bit of advice is not to hesitate to hop on trains to link up routes (so avoiding hills and industrial areas).