Deutsche Alleenstrasse & Concussion Autobahn
- Allee on Rügen (Picture Credit goes to Ralf Heinisch)
Aiming for: Leipzig. University town in Saxony. But until then it is still a bit of a way that leads us via Waren in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern through Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt and finally down to Saxony and Leipzig. We rode it in one day, and large stretches of it on “Deutsche Alleenstraße“ – nice country roads in other words. With its challenges as we will see, but still extremely nice. Here is a map of the entire “Deutsche Alleenstraße“.
We chose country roads for two reasons. Autobahn was scary – unless you feel comfortable with doing 120 km/h on a race track where everyone apart from the trucks overtakes you at a speed between 140 to close to 200 km/h. No speed limit on German Autobahn, remember? OK, there are sometimes signs asking you to do “only” 120 km/h – which is happily ignored by largely everyone. Interesting for me, since I grew up with that fast speed. I did my driving license in Germany and to me 120 km/h once upon a time were veeeeery slow. And the right lane was the “slow lane”. Nowadays I call it the “sane lane”. In Sweden there are only very few stretches where one is allowed to do 120 km/h at a maximum. And if you get caught speeding at “only” 10 km/h more – man, that ticket hurts.
So we decided for country roads apart from two shorter Autobahn stretches on the way down to Leipzig. More fun with bends and more interesting landscape – even though we did sweat a lot again in the summer heat at any speed below 70 km/h.
Interesting landscape and really different road qualities. Country roads in the federal state of Brandenburg for example were totally OK. But try to ride around the city of Brandenburg and I can guarantee that you get a concussion after an hours drive at the most. On the other hand this was the test ride for my new bulbs with reinforced filaments. And they passed.
On the route we took, you could see quite nicely renovated houses in the more touristy areas, mainly of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern like for example in Waren, where we had lunch. Brandenburg is much less touristy and some places are really in the middle of nowhere. We saw a lot of buildings, mainly in small villages, where surely nothing had been done since WWII. No kidding. Really interesting to see all these differences, and frightening at the same time. Why frightening? Because one wonders what people live of in these areas. There are farms, but not much more else, and nowadays these do not employ many people at all. When you go through these areas of Germany you understand the issue with high unemployment rate and lots of unhappy people that must feel totally useless. No wonder people in these situations look back at the GDR-times with tears in their eyes, simply because they had work, they had a living and they were needed. But to explain all that background is a whole different story in itself.
- A small place in the middle of nowhere – Slogan “This is the place to be”. In all fairness, they had quite a decent range of stuff!
Anyway – eventually we made it to Leipzig at around 8pm. After a good stretch of the last 120 km on the “concussion Autobahn”, at least for “slow” riders like us at a speed of 120 km/h (we saw some flying past at 160 km/h plus and they seemed to hobble less). “Concussion Autobahn” we called it because the old stretches are made from concrete plates rather than asphalt. Same road style as in the town of Brandenburg. The connection between the plates especially on older Autobahn is not really smooth and it gives bike and rider a lot of uncomfortable vibration. Tough luck if you already have any back problems. However, as we see later, the road quality increases the further South you get. So it seems road quality is largely dependent on the budget of the individual federal states. Thuringian and Bavarian Autobahn later was in comparison as smooth as – well, as a baby’s bum might be a bit too much as a comment, but something like that. You get the idea.
I had this thought that Germans must feel about their Autobahn like the English do about their railway. They invented it, but it went down the river in their own country in quite a lot of places.
In our case that meant leaving Norrköping at 5.30 am aiming for Trelleborg in South Sweden where the ferry to Sassnitz on Rügen was supposed to leave at 12.45 pm. We managed to be there in good time despite a nice little building site on the road around Malmö. London filtering skills came in handy and revving the engine a bit we moved through there swiftly.
Waiting at the ferry to Sassnitz in Trelleborg. A 4 hours break ahead.
Happy faces 🙂
Crossing by ferry took about 4 hours. We used the time for lunch and conquering a nice place on deck where we could doze off a bit. And study other people on holidays, including the ones that were studying us curiously, since we apparently were the only motorcyclists on board.
Regarding tying the motorcycle aboard I’d like to say, yes, there were belts available, but no dedicated motorcycle places. Two-wheelers are obviously not that common on this connection that the ferry company feels a need catering for these. All went well and everything was manageable, though.
On Rügen, we rode to Bergen which is the main city there and situated in the middle of Germany’s said to be most sunny island. Most sunny, yes, but most “Allee” as well. An “Allee” is a road where you have left a right (and above) a lot of trees and leaves which makes it often really hard to see other cars and motorcycles.
Like in most European countries, motorcycles must have their headlights on in Germany. Not so the cars, though. There it is a recommendation to switch on the light, and this recommendation gets emphasized on Rügen because of the “Allee”-roads. Which of course is ignored by half of the drivers. This combined with vehicles flying your way at 100 km/h + on the clock, on sometimes tight country roads, is something we had to get accustomed to. Cars were all of a sudden faster than motorcycles! And that big times during the next days on the Autobahn, as we will see. We were not used to that.
In Bergen we were lucky enough to find a room quickly, so the bikes did not have to roll too long on the nice old cobble streets. These are clearly nice, but certainly no vehicle’s preference if you’d ask any of them.
The evening we spent in the football-crazy little town of Bergen – Germany won over Argentina with 4:0 and kicked them out of the world cup. We watched car convoys and happy people from a nice table at the small restaurant Bibo Ergo Sum (“I drink, therefore I am”). Great food, nice local beer, simply all you need after a good first day of traveling in sunny weather.
We stayed with Familie Heise in a great room (nice breakfast included!), and the motorcycles were even allowed to sleep in the garage! 50 Euros a night for both of us. Very decent. Master of the premises clearly was Yorkshire terrier Rocky. Like all terriers he forgets about his size and behaves like a Schäfer. But a good watch dog definitely. When we came back into the house from the garage next day, where we tightened the bags onto the bikes, he’d already forgotten that we were still guests and barked at us as if we were total strangers. Short dog, short memory 😉 .
Elisa Travels 