Completing cycling the Berlin Wall Trail

[lethargic_man]

In retrospect, it's a little puzzling that in my first few years in Berlin, I hardly ever cycled out of the city to explore the countryside, given how much I'd enjoyed doing precisely that in Newcastle and Edinburgh (and the one time I went on a bike ride in Cambridge). It must have been the legacy of fifteen years in London, where by the time I'd reached the countryside, I'd had enough and just wanted to turn around and go home again.

Berlin is a third the size of London, but it took the pandemic to teach me that. Meaning: When my work sent us all home from the office, I wanted to do as much cycling each week as I would have done commuting, to keep myself fit. After a few weeks exploring the city, I reached the countryside and rediscovered that it was really nice (duh).

Shortly afterwards, I discovered that the sections of the Berlin Wall Trail on the city edge (including my favourite bike ride in Berlin^*) nicely combine cycling through pleasant countryside (on, generally, at least one side) with well-maintained cycle paths.

* The route takes you through fields, past a small lake then through a pine forest, with sandy areas, then along a raised boardwalk over a marsh, with signs along the way showing the wildlife in the marsh.

After I'd been cycling thus for a little while, I decided to mark out the Berlin Wall Trail on the map where I'd been tracking my cycling progress:

The result inspired me to cycle the rest, and today I closed the last gaps in my coverage (almost entirely in chunks of no more than two hours, that I could squeeze into the time I would, pre-pandemic, have been commuting by bike, plus my lunchbreak) of the 100 mile (160 km) course of the Wall:

Key:
Dashed line = where the Berlin Wall Trail departs from the route of the Wall.
Dotted line = route of the Wall, but not of the Berlin Wall Trail.
Light blue = remaining sections of pipe-onna-wall outer wall. (Other sections of wall remain but are not so obvious.)

And here's how I did the cycling: