Germany: Breathtaking Black Forest

Six nights through France and Germany for the B500, which the operator calls a riding rite of passage and which it largely is. Riders bring their own bike through the tunnel.

Chalons-en-Champagne takes the first night, reached past Reims and the disused Reims-Gueux circuit, where the old pit buildings and grandstand still stand beside a public road that hosted the French Grand Prix until 1966. Eastern France and the Vosges follow, with exhilarating passes and tree-lined hairpins, into the Black Forest and a hotel near Baden-Baden for three nights, a spa town built on hot springs the Romans were already using.

The B500 is the centrepiece, the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse, which runs along the ridge for the better part of a hundred miles and is consistently ranked among the ten best roads in Europe. Rideouts go to Triberg, where Germany’s highest waterfall drops in seven stages, to Titisee, and past the Black Forest dams.

The return crosses the Vosges again by the Route des Cretes, a ridge road built by the French army in 1915 to supply the front, with optional cols off it, and takes in the Verdun memorial, where a battle lasting ten months in 1916 cost both sides something close to a million casualties between them. A final night at Calais closes the trip. The price is quoted per rider. Six nights is short enough for a single week of leave and still includes two of the best roads in western Europe, with three nights in one hotel in the middle of it so that most of the week is spent riding rather than packing.