First day: Into the Taunus

First idea and route planning

Elli brought Franconia up for discussion as a destination for a longer tour. So far, we knew Franconia mainly from several music festivals and the delicious locally brewed beers we consumed on those.

So I decided to check out the Franconian breweries with attached beer gardens in search for appropriate overnight accommodation. The resulting candidates I visualised in a Google Map layer. Then, I searched the interwebs for gpx-files of motorcycle tours through Franconia and found frankentourismus.de to be a very helpful site. From the tours offered there, I chose the most promising and put them into additional layers of the map. So I could build a route that closely runs past the brewery candidates and the following emerged:

As you can see, this time the actual route is much closer to the planned one than was the case with our previous tour through the Alsace last year.

1st day: to Eppstein via the valleys of Sayn and Lahn

The first leg of our journey will bring us to Eppstein in the Taunus, to old friends who kindly and on very short notice offered us a place to stay for a night.

Up to Neuwied these are well known roads which we use for easily getting into flow along the Rhine.

Before we tackle the more challenging part through the valley of the Sayn, we decide to strengthen ourselves with caffein at the beer garden Sayner Scheune. When we are ready to roll, so is a weird horde of trike riders. Fortunately they take the opposite direction (1).

Feeling reinvigorated and cheery, we now make our way through the valley which in all its splendor in the bright sunshine brings a constant smile to our faces. We are in luck and can enjoy the whole stretch without any mad speeders.

In Montabaur a roadblock forces us to circumnavigate the castle – not the worst diversion ever.

From Limburg on we are on the lookout for the river Lahn, but it keeps evading us by receding from the roads. We finally find it in Runkel, where the views are very picturesque.

We continue on to Weilburg, where we have a lunch break at Tommy’s.

We then follow the river Weil, until we finally reach Niederreifenberg, where our host comes to meet us on his own bike and escorts us to Eppstein, where a barbecue awaits us.

A very successful and enjoyable first day of the journey.

(1) – Disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing against trike riders, or weird people for that matter. It was more the horde thingy, that gave me pause and made me glad they went the other way.