Holland/Belgium/Germany Motorcycle Ride

This past weekend I took a ride up to Holland from Stuttgart on my BMW F800GS. I was in a hurry to get there so I took the highway on the way up. On the way back, I took a long ride from Maastricht down into Belgium and through a piece of the Ardennes Forest and over the Eifel in Western Germany. It's an incredible place thick with dark Belgian pine over a mossy primeval forest floor. It's easy to see where the Brothers Grimm got the setting for a lot of their stories.

I came out of Eupen in Belgium and traveled across the German border and into Monschau, a medieval village deep in a gorge on the Ruhr River. After a lunch of smoked trout and salad, I continued on down the ancient Roman route to Trier, the oldest city in Germany.

It was nice to get out for a long ride late in November when the weather is normally uncooperative. But by the time I left Trier and the sun went down, the temperature dropped swiftly as I rode over the Hunsruck and down to Kaiserslautern. But a hot shower and a fine dinner at the Barbarossahof put things right.

Black Forest Sunday

Despite the unsettled weather, I took a motorcycle ride up into the Black Forest in search of smoked trout and was not disappointed. The Wurzbachtal Forellenzucht in Calmbach served me up a whole smoked trout and some crisp white wine and I noshed away while reading the New Yorker and listened to the babbling stream just behind my table. Baby trout jumped randomly out of a small pond, sometimes literally - an evening meal for a waschbear (raccoon) or the family cat.
This was followed by a relaxing and hypnotic ride down the Klein Enztal, flowing around corners like water in the river below. On the ride back, I drifted in and out of a rainstorm heading my way back to Stuttgart. By the time I got to Herrenberg on the last leg home, I was slightly soggy and anxious for some relaxation.