Tag Archives: 100 Schlösser Route

Darfeld to Vreden

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Schloss Darfeld

The 100 Schlösser Route extends its tentacles in this part of NRW so broadly that it’s difficult not to intersect with it, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen Schloss Darfeld before.

Then to Vreden, cutting out some of the unnecessary loops of our chosen cycle route. It wasn’t so pleasant a day nor so interesting a route that taking the direct option didn’t seem preferable. The last section from Stadtlohn to Vreden was just right – not quite direct but not so ridiculously circumlocutious as to be annoying.

Marienfeld to Warendorf

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This morning we said goodbye to the Hellweg-Weser and hello to a short section of the R1 that will take us to Arnhem. This is also part of the Ems Radweg, so it was nice to encounter the river again after following it for some days in May.

Even by our new-normal standards, this was a short day. The weather forecast was for a strong headwind and very strong gusts, so the idea of reaching Münster in one day was shelved. It was a pleasant ride nonetheless so long as you didn’t get hit by flying acorns, with – in deference to the distance – just the one cake for me today. At Warendorf we picked up the 100 Schlösser Route once again, and the Markt was a familiar sight from our previous visit. I had time to wander around the town – very well-kept and quiet, with cars kept out of the centre (and hence lots of bicycles).

I’ve forgotten to mention all the apple and pears trees beside the roads; scrumping is the norm, and it’s noticeable how all the easy-to-reach fruit has been picked. Beneath each tree is a mushy pile of windfalls.

Papenburg to Heek

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Back to a boring maximum speed of about 22 kph, so to do this distance we needed the assistance of the train from Papenburg to Rheine. The usual anxiety about getting our bikes on the train, so I checked with the ticket office beforehand. (A ticket office: there’s luxury.) Question: where was the bike space? Answer: each carriage has bike spaces front and back. Total number of bikes conveyed: 24. (More in the summer holiday season.) This seemed like riches indeed – but the reality is that if a train has 24 bike spaces, there will be 23 bicycles on it – particularly if it’s the day after Himmelfahrt. We had no problem at Papenburg, but the train quickly filled up.

We cycled the same route out of Rheine as a week ago along the easy-peasy disused railway, but this time into a sunny headwind. Heek is en fête – nice for Heek but not for anyone hoping for an early night. It’s the town’s Schützenfest – a concept I have difficulty in getting my head around. Schützen means to protect, but this kind of thing is all about guns and shooting. I suppose I should think of it as a celebration of the historical tradition of local self-protection – an early kind of Home Guard perhaps? – and target-shooting is part of it. Also included is parading in green jackets and dark green ties behind a local band – and lots of drinking.

We arrived in Heek in good time so headed off in nostalgic mood along the 100 Schlösser Route to see Burg Nienborg. How many have we ticked off now?

Rheine to Zutphen

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In addition to train disruptions, the weather forecast is getting wetter, so I’ve decided to bunny-hop across the Netherlands. Bicycle-train-bicycle. Hopefully I’ll end up where I need to be and stay reasonably dry.

Today I left Rheine and followed a direct route to the Dutch border. Another grey, damp day, so more photos of orange leaves and winding routes (some of them obscured by said orange leaves). I swerved the centre of Bad Bentheim, got confused in Oldenzaal thanks to my navigation and another omleiding, and caught the train from Hengelo-Oost to Zutphen.

The Netherlands are much further along the everything-on-the-app route than Britain. I feel like the kid in class with the wrong trainers. Hengelo-Oost is a tiny station (easier to navigate with a bicycle) with a ticket machine that refused to accept either of my cards. I bought my ticket online instead but couldn’t see how to include a bicycle ticket. Unfortunately the emailed ticket is not the ticket – oh, no. You have to download it to the NS app . . . which I then acquired. But the ticket and the app refused to communicate – so, eventually, there I was, on a train with an invalid ticket for me and no bicycle ticket in a country where exiting bigger stations (e.g. Zutphen) is like Alcatraz unless you have the magic bar code.

I needn’t have worried after all: no ticket collectors, no barriers at the station, and a ticket machine that graciously allowed me to buy a bicycle ticket after the event. And I had time to wander around Zutphen before it went dark. Typical Dutch centre and a church that made me realise how building in brick allows you to build enormous multiple windows with more delicate supports than in stone. It makes the massive structures seem transparent.

Dinner in tonight’s hotel was a tasting menu. No choice (except that I specified no meat) so a succession of morsels was placed before me and described minutely. Dinner as performance, and I played along with it – noticing the flavours and eating more delicately than is my (bad) habit. An interesting experience but I’m not bothered about repeating it.

Osnabrück to Rheine

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Reasons why I like cycling in Germany #273: I leave a bland city-centre hotel where the lingua franca is International English and set off to find my parallel cycling universe. And there it is, only a couple of blocks away. Infrastructure, signs, considerate drivers and – above all – the confidence that this will not all disappear in the next couple of miles.

Comfort cycling in Osnabrück

I started off on the scenic route – a compensation to myself for shelving my original plans. Even though I’ve cycled in this region before, it was still pleasant and felt novel – uppy-downy with some wooded paths. I even ended up on the 100 Schlösser Route, which was ironic since it was in order to escape that route that I’d come to Germany! The day was grey and damp – so damp that the moisture coalesced and fell as light rain in the early afternoon. Thank goodness for leaves: the beech trees glowed orange even in the dull light. At my lunch stop (which seemed to materialise at the right moment since it was only 25 minutes before it closed) I realised that I wasn’t even half way to Rheine. Fortunately the second half was more direct, clinging to the Ibbenbürener Aa, crossing the Mittellandkanal and following the Dortmund-Ems canal towards Rheine. (With an Umleitung, of course. There are always Umleitungen or Omleidingen beside canals.)

I kept to the main road coming into Rheine; there was a cycle lane and the weather didn’t encourage me to dawdle. One has a very different perspective cycling on the more usual thoroughfares rather than threading a way in via railway sidings, allotments and streams. You can see how main-road stores with car parks are eating away at town centres. Heigh ho: times change.

It was nice not to eat in the hotel but to walk through the town to find a restaurant that took my fancy and watch cyclists’ red lights glide across the square while sipping my Grauburgunder.

Coesfeld to Borken

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I thought I’d factored in religious festivals – days when shops close and even open cafés can be hard to find. I knew we were safe from Himmelfahrt and Pfingsten this holiday, but Corpus Christi (Fronleichman) caught me out today in this Roman Catholic part of Germany.

Not that it mattered. It was a repeat ride from last year with no other surprises, and there were enough cafés open for two coffee stops.

Oh, and I think I’ve discovered that roadside wind turbines interfere with the working of cycle computers. So that’s 200m to add to today’s tally.