‘Within hours you are in a transformed riding environment’
Roads that flow like mighty German rivers — and just an afternoon’s ride from home
IT’S NOT THE best-known part of biking Europe and I only stumbled across it because it sits between my two favourite racetracks — Spa Francorchamps in Belgium and Nürburgring just over the border. However, the Eifel region in western Germany offers a compelling ride. Especially if you like open sweepers and ribbons of meandering, super-fast tarmac.
The trick is to turn left as you leave Calais and pick up the E42 motorway that bisects the bulk of Belgium, before peeling off for Spa or, a few miles later, Eupen and crossing into Germany. Within a few hours of leaving England, you are in a transformed riding environment.
Eifel is lumpy rather than mountainous, all hills and valleys blanketed in spruce and pine. Compared to the biking hotspots of Europe, it is blissfully empty, watched over by towering wind turbines that feed on air so fresh it makes the bike feel just a little more eager, too.
The big roads — try the 258 from Monschau to Hirten for starters – are wide and rapid, with long, constant-radius turns that hold the bike on its side forever. Between them are lattice works of minor roads, some with intricate wiggles that drop into gravelly second-gear hairpins, others that sweep immaculately across the hillside before bursting out onto rolling plateaus with views seemingly into Poland.
Where’s best? All of it. You can’t go wrong. But plan A should be to set up base at a central gasthaus — they’re always clean and functional, though the closer you get to Nürburg, the busier they are in summer — and simply explore from there.