Hiking around Hohenlimburg!

For the second time within three weeks, things went extremely wrong today, just as unexpectedly as during the hike from Ronsdorf to Schwelm.

It’s now May, but there’s nothing to compare with the May we saw last year. This year, it’s cold, it’s humid and it’s rainy. And for today, the weather forecast made a roller coaster until the last moment, where it looked like there might be sporadic shower some time in the afternoon; it was just entirely wrong. More to this later in this article.

We had another hike last year around Hohenlimburg (when it was warm and sunny). On that day, we had a break at Haus Becker, a very nice B&B with a café. I always wanted to plan another hike there since then. So this time, I planned one that went from Hohenlimburg.

Today, in the morning, as always I arrived fairly late, so there were already a few people standing in front of Düsseldorf central, where I learned that there were two tickets still missing. Well, usually we get more tickets in the last moment, why should we be concerned. It’s true that more people arrived, but every time we got more people who didn’t have a ticket. When the train arrived, there were still two tickets missing. But the great ending of this part of the story is that exactly in this moment two people arrived who had a ticket. So we could all peacefully enter the train without buying an additional ticket.

We’ve been to Hagen several times to change trains (at least eight times as far as I can see). Most of the time, we take the train to Lüdenscheid. So today, I was automatically going to that platform, until some people realised that the platform was completely wrong. Indeed, the line going to Hohenlimburg is a different one. I knew it beforehand, but I didn’t really think about it. It’s really great that people paid attention (which is actually the nicer way to say the syntactically equivalent phrase: “it’s horrible that I made a mistake”).

Just like everywhere in the Hagen region, we went through a steep uphill right at the beginning. The sun was burning above us. It was a rapid transition from last week’s entirely flat hike. But this area offers nice viewpoints, like the one that you can see above (even though the ground in front of us looked more like a disaster).

420 meters uphill in total is certainly not too much for a day, but the fact that it came at once at the beginning obviously exhausted everyone. Here, you can see on the photo above that people started making a break spontaneously. I knew that we were reaching a plateau eventually, but I had hard time convincing them, because it also appeared to me like we were going uphill all the time (even though it was not continuous; it also went down occasionally). Maybe some people left us on the way.

But of course, we eventually reached the plateau. It looked very much like a really nice hike from that moment. The disaster arrived when we reached the break: the café, Haus Becker, I was looking forward to was closed, due to lack of personnel. I must say this was a huge mistake of mine, since I could have contacted them in advance, especially with regard to the fact that it was written on their website. And the problem was, not only I couldn’t get delicious cake, but also there was nothing else nearby, so that we were forced to have a break outside. But the disaster was not over yet. We had to wait a few minutes more, until the sky started to become noisier: it started pouring down.

There were certainly occasions, like the hike in Schwelm. Ironically, we had almost the same set of problems, namely the lack of access to a restaurant/café and unexpected rain. This time, it didn’t stop, so that the entire second half was wet. And of course, this is Hagen. It is just only nasty when the weather is bad in Hagen. I felt really sorry to those who were not prepared at all. It’s true that I took my umbrella only because of the experience in Schwelm. Otherwise I would have been hit the same way.

In the end, the potentially beautiful hike became a small piece of misfortune. I’m very sure that the second half would have been a really intriguing one. Well, maybe next time…

The trail can be downloaded from this link (kml-format) or this link (gpx-format)