Cycling from Düsseldorf to Moers and Street Food and Music Festival!

The cycling trip to Cologne a few weeks ago did not work out not as well as I wished it would. Still I thought it’s not right to make a decision based on one experience. Since we had another long weekend this weekend, I decided to organise another session today. Also, there was the Street Food and Music Festival in Moers this weekend, which lies at a fairly nice distance from Düsseldorf.

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For some reason, apparently I decided to set the meeting point in front of the central station, which is a horrible place to start cycling. So in the WhatsApp group I told everyone to wait in front of Tonhalle, which turned out to be a quite bad idea; just like last time, people waited on the wrong side of Tonhalle. I really have to think about a better meeting point for next time, a place that can be uniquely identified.

This time, the other side of the Rhine was really comfortable. This side is called Oberkassel and this is where rich people and a lot of Japanese people live. And while cycling, you can already see that it’s a rich area where people try to preserve a nice neighbourhood. This continued well into Duisburg. So there wasn’t much to do for me this time.

The problem came when we arrived at Uerdingen. Essentially, I realised there that actually no one had the trail today. At the same time, there were always a few of them who wanted to be far ahead of us. In strong contrast to usual hiking, the stretch becomes much larger, so that it was essentially impossible to bring them back. My dilemma was of course, whether to follow them or continue the original plan. Well, I followed them, which was more like catching up in order to go back to the original route. At least Uerdingen was a nice little town along the river. And we could get an ice cream there :).

Things started to become more complicated after Uerdingen. It is true that there were not much traffic, but still we were not really cycling in the nature anymore. For me, it was interesting to see the somewhat outdated industrial area, but for those who genuinely want to enjoy cycling, it was probably not the right place to be.

Contrary to hiking, where we can essentially expect everyone to be able to do just as much as everyone else, cycling can be hopelessly strenuous for those who don’t have a good bike. This aspect was not that acutely important today, but towards the end it was still visible; some people wanted more breaks and others simply wanted to continue, which made it even more difficult to keep the group together.

So, in the end, I must say despite the small number of participants (8), it was one of the most stressful sessions I have experienced so far. I somehow have to acknowledge the fact that it is simply difficult to make people get organised themselves, due to the problems I mentioned above. Right now, I’m not so motivated to organise another one. Hm, let’s see…