This was the final, longest, and hardest stage of my circuit of the Mauerradweg. I rode 70 km from Wannsee to Warshauerstraße and would not recommend doing that. Not because it’s boring or unattractive: there are stunning lakes and villas, sweeping field views, lovely forests, beer gardens, canals, parks, and interesting urban sites. But this stretch also contains some of the hardest riding on the Mauerweg with multiple, sustained sections of sand, dirt, cobblestone, and poor paving. In the true Südroute plan you only have to bite off a 40-ish-km chunk of this action, and that’s what I would recommend.
The forecast was for thundershowers, but I woke to blue skies and an improved outlook and thought I’d lucked out. More on that shortly…. After picking up my customary picnic supplies at the grocery store, I caught the RE1 to Wannsee. June 1 was the first day of Germany’s experimental “ride all public transit countrywide for 9€ a month this summer” program, so of course when I went to buy the e-ticket version of that, the server was down. So I bought a paper ticket at the station like a normal person and was on my way.
There’s this funny thing that happens with bikes on the train in Berlin—you can take them on the regional trains and the S-Bahnhofstrasse with a special ticket, but there aren’t racks per se, so everyone just adds their bike to a growing bike pile as they come on, and then there’s this sort of square-dance of folks jumping up to help people extricate their ride when it’s time for them to disembark. I found it stressful at first but now it’s kind of communal and fun. As long as you’re not fussy about your bike or people handling it….
The stretch out of Wannsee was gorgeous—all lakeside, and as I rode the villas turned into schlösser (“castles,” but really just huge mansions), as if they were being inflated. I passed a number of leafy Wirtshäuser that I made a note to come back to sometime for cake and coffee, or beer and a pretzel. I got a nice view of one of the Persius churches as well: he’s an interesting architect who’s most famous for building several of Berlin’s utility plants as exotic fantasies of Florentine, Byzantine, Rajasthani architecture etc. The Havelsee church is a restrained Italianate number compared to his usual standards.
The stretch between Teltow and Schönefeld was the toughest riding, which makes sense as it’s also where the Wall ran cross-country, and also there are several detours around private land. However, there’s a lovely treat in the middle, and that’s the Asahi TV Kirschblütenallee, a section of the route lined with 1,000 cherry trees gifted by Japan in the early 1990s. I missed the blooming this spring, but the allee was still tranquil and refreshing.
The path improved for the last stretch of the ride, taking me along the Spree and several of its canals past the Mercedes Benz plant and other industrial sites. I was getting tired at this point, and the headwind along the river didn’t help on that front. But I got a nice surprise when a section I thought would be annoying broken-up jogs across busy urban streets turned out to be a peaceful meander up a green belt past kleingartenanlegen (serious community gardens complete with little houses and usually a beer garden—my favorite German thing ever) and grassy birch plantations.
This is when the weather I thought I had gamed got its revenge—literally in the last 10 minutes of the ride when it started thundering and absolutely bucketing down cold rain. I knew where I was by this point and gave up following the official Mauerweg and rabbited for home, holing up at my local grocery just long enough to dry out my phone and pick up a bottle of wine and some bath salts. Oh well: the good news is I completely forgot I was tired for those last 10 minutes, and the problem of how I was going to get all the mud and sand off my bike from the impromptu mountain-biking we had done that day was miraculously solved. So, all told it was a dramatic and fitting end to my Mauerradweg adventure!
The Rookery 
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