Hiking from Erkrath to Hilden!

As many of you already know, Saturday is our movie night. With only 3 people turning up (+Jen and Sumanta who went back home at the beginning of the movie because they were too tired), my expectations were not particularly high. That changed drastically, when Nikola introduced two bottles of red wine, one from Macedonia and another one from Sicily.

This morning, at 10:30, with enormous difficulty I got out of my bed, hitting the wall several times without being able to stand straight for some time. I had a quick breakfast and went to the station. Today’s meeting time was 10:45 and I arrived there at 10:55. I was wondering what people would do without me.

To my surprise, they got organized and went to the platform themselves. I mean, I have always claimed that they would be able to do everything without me, but it was really nice to see that it was true.

I was expecting less people now, since the temperature dropped significantly in the recent weeks. But still we saw something like 35 people this time. Maybe people spend more time in the internet and check out couch surfing events more often. Well, in the end I don’t know why there are still so many people. There were also some people from last time, like Tim from US, who has been traveling in Europe for some time.

The train journey took only a couple of minutes. I would have loved to sleep a little bit.

As you can see on the map, this area has already been visited extensively. Some people, like Bulut, recognized the trail quite quickly. But anyway the last time we visited this area was when it was still very warm.

It’s not really like I’m talking all the time whenever I go hiking, but today I talked particularly little. I was still feeling horrible during the hike. The small hill at the beginning of the hike felt like I was trying something quite impossible.

From the beginning, the break was supposed to be at the Unterbachersee, where we did the second break when we were there last time. It was around half of the entire trail, but it appeared to me like we were walking forever, even though it must have been something like 8km up to that point. It was really good to sit down again. In this moment, it started raining a little bit, only a little bit, though. As obviously I did not have enough time this morning, I did not have anything to eat. I ordered sandwiches at the restaurant. They said it would take some time. “Some time” turned out to be more than 30 min. I started wondering whether they would evergive me the sandwiches, so I asked them again, only to hear “we told you it takes some time”. This is a typical situation in Germany. For having warned me, they are allowed to do whatever they like. If I warn you I might steal money, I’m entitled to stealing money. Why not.

When we arrived at the lake, it started raining a little bit, but then we were under the roof. It rained every time until last week and today we could see the sun almost all the time. Not quite surprisingly, Clara was not there with us.

Some people went back home from the lake. I was sharing almost the same desire… Well, on the other hand, I was also starting to feel better.

The end of this “short” hike was in Hilden, where almost all of us went to a local ice cream dealer. Hilden being actually a quite small city, the ice cream dealer was also quite small. The same thing happens every time but there was a panic with 20 people arriving at once. Still Italians are nice people. They apparently enjoyed the unusual moment there.