Hiking around Lennep

There’s this lost legacy of the previous German administration: German railway. They yet again managed to marked history by cancelling our train connection at Hagen. This time, fortunately, they announced it one day in advance, so that we could act accordingly. But I’m gonna come back to the German railway later again.

So today, in the midst of this year’s weird summer, we decided to hike around Lennep, with the obvious goal of swimming in the Wuppertalsperre, which appeared a handy replacement for the lake at Schalksmühle, where we were initially planning to go. Funnily enough, as soon as I changed the plan more people started joining, probably because it was a lot easier for people from Cologne to join. For us from Düsseldorf there was indeed also this simple connection over Solingen, where you just have to go across the platform to reach the S9. Quite simple.

There was a large mass of people today, occupying this small train. It was nice to see again how people started wondering why there were so many people leaving the train in a rather small stop of Lennep.

Lennep is not a big city, but since we always have to cross the city in order to reach the Wuppertalsperre, it takes still some time to reach the nature. Today it didn’t appear so long to me, even though we take pretty much the same track every time.

We have hiked in this area quite a few times. So today I made a rather long route around the lake in order to see something a little bit new.

I think it was a great idea: while the rest of the area is so so, the nature was a lot more beautiful there. There was also a beautiful mixture of a lot of different things – fields, forests, lake and so on. I guess we’re gonna take a bus or so in the near future to hike around this area more often.

There were also these weird lamas. They may have been the highlight of the day.

There were some bridges crossing the lake. They were all kind of spectacular, because they appeared every time as we left forest, so it looked like the vision cleared all of a sudden.

For today’s hike, I planned two breaks: First one when we reach the lake, then the second one at the public bathing area of the Kräwinkel bridge where we always have a break, because the hike itself was pretty long and the public area was rather towards the end of the hike.

I didn’t really know how it goes to have two breaks, but for the first one it worked pretty well: Davy found a nice area right next to the lake, where the water was not so inviting as it was pretty muddy, but for a short break to eat something it was pretty good. In the meantime, some people told me that it’s strictly forbidden in the Cologne hiking group to plan a break like this spontaneously. They say there’s no apparent reason why they shouldn’t do it, but it’s forbidden because the famous admin doesn’t like it. It’s so funny to see the difference, because I prefer people to make decisions themselves, so that the rest of us can follow.

We took a group photo there, but as I had imagined, the break was relatively short, and we continued towards the second break. It was again a beautiful area around the lake, with nice paths and little difficulty.

The public area was fairly full, but not overcrowded. We could easily find space to sit in the shadow, and some people could immediately go towards the lake to swim. Usually there are not so many going into the water, but for some reason today it was a big majority.

It was not extremely hot today, but still I had sweated and it was nice to cool down in the water. It was so nice that I swam across the lake (about 200 m?) and came back.

In the meantime, there were some kids jumping from the bridge. It must have been at something like 10 m from the water. I first thought it was forbidden, but no one was stopping them. I found out later that it’s not exactly forbidden, but obviously not recommended either. I was personally not interested, but then Dayanne started forcing me to jump, so I went up with her to the bridge. I already knew that it was really high, but it looked even higher when I stood on the edge. There was even some random guy coming towards me to encourage me to jump lol. Then I asked Jörg, who was also there to jump, to count so that Dayanne and I can jump at the same time. Frankly I kind of hoped she would cancel it, but she didn’t, so made up my mind and jumped. My goodness it was high.

My arms hurt quite a lot, but it was a nice experience in the end. Dayanne on the other hand lost her Apple Watch which she got only last year. That became the joke of the day.

In total, we stayed for more than 1 hour at the lake. It was definitely a pity for those who didn’t swim, because it was such a nice experience, and there was probably not much to gain for them to wait for us.

We then walked back to Lennep. There was a small section which Komoot chose, which didn’t exist, but we could easily find a way around. Again we walked through a beautiful area with a lot of different elements, like field, forest, water and so on.

We stopped at Lennep to go for an ice cream. This is a bit like our tradition whenever we go there.

So, on the way back home, we found out that our S9 was having a 5-min delay. As there were only 5 min to change trains at Solingen, it appeared difficult, but then it’s also just across the platform, so we decided to give it a try. A very bad idea. There was a police activity on the way, and our train got cancelled at Solingen Mitte. So instead of waiting for the next train, we decided to take a bus to Solingen Central, which took like forever, and so we also lost the next connection. In the end we arrived in Düsseldorf with a delay of 1h. It was some time past 8pm that we arrived in Düsseldorf. Good job German railway. Yet again.