Hiking report

Hiking from Mettmann to Kettwig!

The summer-ish weather of last week crumbled quickly this week, towards Easter. It reached the minimum today. When I got up this morning, it was raining. The sky looked like politicians: gray, not really clear what it wanted to say. Since it was in the middle of Easter, I was anyway not expecting a high turnout, so I put a relatively long trail in the middle of a dull region. And this weather. It was a wonder that there were still people willing to go hiking with us.

Now you might be wondering, why we did a boring hiking trail even though there are way more trails than Sundays that I have in Düsseldorf. That’s related to how the railway lines are organised in this region. There are two horizontal lines that go from East to West, i.e. the one that goes from Dortmund to Duisburg, and the one that goes from Hagen to Düsseldorf. And there are three vertical lines that go from South to North, namely the one from Düsseldorf to Duisburg, the one from Wuppertal to Essen and the one from Hagen to Dortmund. With two horizontal lines and three vertical lines, it leaves two empty squares. Today’s trail would somewhat fill one of the squares, the western one. All this just to say one thing: I wanted to do this trail for geometric reasons, not because it was a beautiful trail.

Today’s starting point, Mettmann, lies on a train line, which starts at Düsseldorf and ends at Mettmann, i.e. everyone had to come to Düsseldorf first in order to go there. Of course I did it on purpose, so that someone can take me for free on his/her ticket. It must have been a nightmare for those coming from Bochum for example today. Not bad that there were still some of them. Even Thomas skipped.

Anyway, we were 12 when we left Mettmann. It was already raining, although not very strongly. This already not very beautiful city, Mettmann, looked even uglier today.

Some time last year, I must have cycled this way all the way from Mettmann to Kettwig. Somehow I thought it was completely flat except for the last part. Certainly we cannot say it was mountainous, but it was not very flat either. Regarding the fact that we did not have a break up to Heiligenhaus, which was already 11 km away from Mettmann, it was not surprising that we were starting to be silent after some time.

When we arrived at Heiligenhaus, the rain became even stronger. We sat under the roof in front of a closed café. It was cold, but I kind of liked watching the rain there. Well, it’s a common feeling that we all like to watch rain from dry space.

There’s this part between Heiligenhaus and Kettwig that I was looking forward to. Just as everywhere next to the Ruhr on the south side, it was a steep hill. So we could have a great view over the Ruhr. Luckily, the weather was not particularly bad in that moment.

Even though Kettwig is rather famous for its old city and therefore a touristic place, there was almost nothing open today. I was expecting to be one ice cream parlor to be open (because it was Italian and not German), but even that one was closed. Somehow, there was this one German pub that was open. At least we could have warm drinks inside. It was a long journey today, after all.

So much for the last hike in my 20s. The weather forecast predicts an extremely good weather for next weekend. That’s all about my life. I’ll look forward to it 🙂

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

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