Schloss Steinfurt

A few weeks ago I decided to head for the nearby castle Schloss Steinfurt, situated in the county seat of Steinfurt. Taking the direct route, this trip is fast and easy--probably about 12km. Taking the indirect route, which I like to do, was not so fast but turned out to be relatively straight forward nonetheless. Before entering altstadt (old city) Steinfurt, with its grand castle, I happened upon a wonderful city park that, until this ride, I didn't know existed.

Schloss Steinfurt itself is bit hard to describe and even harder to capture on film because so much of it is not visible from the public roads and pathes. For starters, the castle is privately owned. So getting close is difficult. To make matters worse, a golf course abuts two sides of the castle property and privately owned houses another side. Thus, the castle can only be viewed from the main street, which doesn't allow one to really capture the size of this residence.



I didn't stick around Steinfurt for too long. My next destination was an old Holland-style windmill out in the middle of no where. The trail leading to the windmill was very well marked, thank goodness, because the trail itself was a bit rough at times:



Unfortunately, this too was only accessible from one side and the sun was not cooperating. The best shot I got of the windmill is below:



The trip home from the windmill was quite interesting. I decided to stray off the marked trails and depend on my map. At one point was riding through someone's field on an electric tower right-of-way. At another point I came to a cross roads and had difficulty locating my position on the map. Eventually, I just guessed and kept riding. The ride itself took about 3 hours and covered about 41km and a very pleasant Fall day.