Into the Odenwald

It is high time for a short getaway and the weather forecast promises a stable high for the last week of August.

This time, I will try something different for the route planning. I want to include the community of motovlog.de into the process. To that end we first stake out the rough corner points of the trip: Odenwald, Franconia with its valleys of Tauber and Altmühl, Franconian Switzerland and then back along the Rhön. We then let kurviger.de calculate a first route and pour that into the discord channel of the community asking for comments and improvements.

This crowdsourcing works marvellously. After plenty of feedback, the following route emerged. Transferring this from kurviger.de into Garmin BaseCamp turned out to be the usual pain in the sphincter.

I kind of understand that different systems will route differently through identical waypoints. But why the Garmin Zumo time and again decides to use different routes than the ones planned in BaseCamp, even using motorways which it is explicitly forbidden to do, will always remain a riddle to me.

First day – into the Odenwald

Everything is packed, all checklist items ticked off, we’re ready to go. The first leg takes us along our home course along the river Ahr and past the Nürburgring to Landkern and on to Cochem to the river Moselle.

There we have our first coffee stop of the day at the Hotel Union right on the river bank.

Still in Cochem we cross the Moselle and head into the Hunsrück towards Kastellaun, where we scheduled our lunch break. Spaghetti Bolognese in the Pizzeria Adria below the castle help us to fill up our energy levels and soon we are ready to continue our journey.

In Bad Kreuznach we are surrounded by thunderstorms all of a sudden. We use our refuelling stop to check the weather situation and let it calm down a bit. The young gas station attendant is quite interested and curious about our motorbikes and touring with them. He asks a lot of question, which we answer readily.

After Bad Kreuznach things get a bit stressful because the satnav decides to be in one of its moods and leads us to the ferry at Gernsheim on roads that are not very nice and definitely not the ones we planned. To make matters worse, the rain catches up with us while we wait for the ferry over the river Rhine.

On the other side we decide to have a rain break in the Gernsemer Fährhaus. We each order a Cola Light, which is served in half-liter glasses (Elli calls those “Bembel-Cola”). The rain gets even worse, so we have to move inside in order to avoid being drenched even more than we already are.

For the last leg of the day we receive some last minute change of plan:

We follow this advice, navigating old-school following road signs. We ride ourselves dry in the beautiful evening sun after the rain. This tip truly paid off and this leg was the most beautiful of the day in my opinion. Thanks, Mister B!

The last few hundred meters to our destination for the day, the Lärmfeuer, the satnav leads us along some rather adventurous residents-only streets. A farmwoman with a wheelbarrow is not amused by our presence. I will realise only the next morning that there is a perfectly easy and shorter alternative for getting to the hotel.

Even while we are parking the bikes, the innkeeper comes down from the house, introduces herself as Isabella, and hands us each a flip-top bottle of Schlappe-Seppel-Specialität. Now that’s a welcome 🙂

We enjoy the evening mood for a bit longer bevor we begin to unpack the bikes.

For dinner we decide not to follow the advice of the well informed Mister B for once and pass up on the cooked cheese he recommends. Our choice is tasty nonetheless. We would rather pass up on having to listen to the conversation of the trio from Bremen at the next table as well, that is held in ever louder voices as the evening progresses.

With 88,- Euro for a double room, the Lärmfeuer might not be the cheapest option, but the hearty welcome, the beautiful location and the good food definitely make it worthy of a recommendation.

The owners are bikers themselves, and I spot their racing cows behind the house.