Germany: Road bike tour without planning - A spontaneous road bike tour through Germany

It's marvellous that you can't rely on anything. Not on the railway, which refuses to transport our reserved bike. Not on the September weather, which is anything but stable in late summer. But these are the best conditions for our plan. We are looking for pure improvisation and want to spend four or five days on our road bikes without deciding where to go. We want to decide whether to turn left or right or continue straight on depending on the wind and weather, traffic and stops. We don't have a smartphone with us, just ancient mobile phones in our jersey pockets. But we need them straight away.

We are the photo reporter from Munich and the reporter from Lübeck. In order to set off together, we need to do a minimum of pre-planning. Firstly, where could we meet? In the middle of Germany, we decide, and choose the railway station in Mühlhausen, Thuringia, as the meeting and starting point for the tour. Mühlhausen offers two good prerequisites: Firstly, the Thuringian Basin is geographically located in the centre of Germany, and secondly, we don't know our way around there.

First of all, Deutsche Bahn is annoying. The IC train from Munich is cancelled and the conductor of the replacement train, an ICE, refuses to take any bikes on board. Reservation for the original IC train or not. With the next possible connection, the photographer and his racing bike would only arrive in Mühlhausen hours later - too late to set off today. But as we don't have a destination for the day anyway, we simply change our plans. Three hours before we set off on our route, we decide to meet further south in Arnstadt in Thuringia; my colleague arrives much earlier and we can set off in the early afternoon.

Briefing at Arnstadt railway station. I have a newspaper tear-out with me, picked up on the regional train. The weather card, as small as a postage stamp, only promises sunshine in the east. In the west - all we have to do is lift our heads - rain clouds are gathering. The die is cast shortly after 2 pm: We flee from the clouds to the east.

You can find the entire travel report with these tours as a PDF download below:

- Day 1: Arnstadt - Kahla-Leubengrund (72 kilometres, 700 metres in altitude)
- Day 2: Kahla-Leubengrund - Zwickau-Moselle (128 kilometres, 1,300 metres in altitude)
- Day 3: Zwickau-Moselle - Löbsal (122 kilometres, 1,100 metres in altitude)
- Day 4: Löbsal - Wurzen (72 kilometres, 350 metres in altitude)

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