Hiking from Steele to Hattingen!

This week saw a radical change at my place. I’m not really sure, if I already wrote that my flatmate, Alfredo, went to the Caribbean for 2 months for his work, which happened last weeks. And on Tuesday this week, Karina, who is Alfredo’s girlfriend and also lived here, announced she was leaving for the Caribbean as well, exactly the day after she told it to me. So all of a sudden, I’m living all alone in this large apartment, although it’s very likely that their room will be occupied by another person, whoever it is going to be.

Today’s hike was supposed to be from Steele to Bochum. However, those who knew the region found the trail extremely unattractive (not quite surprisingly, since it was essentially going through the city), which made me change it to the one that we did today. It was pretty much the same station, just the destination was quite different. While creating this trail, I was myself not quite impressed by it. The fact that there were already some people who had signed up for the event made me unwilling to change the location. And this was the best possible choice, I believe.

It is again the carnival week here in this region, from Thursday to Monday. To cite what Théo last year said “it’s the only week of the year where Germans are funny”. Even if this statement is a bit exaggerated, it’s true that it’s a crazy week and you can see people, well dressed up and well prepared, everywhere in the street. I was walking towards the railway station in this craze, to see only Ehsan. Today, we were exactly two people when we entered the station. Even at the very first hike, we were four. Well, it’s maybe rather weird that we were still going hiking on the day of Carnival. Fortunately, more and more people joined on the way. When we arrived at Essen-Steele Ost, we were around 25 people.

In the first 30 min or so after we left the train station we were just going through civilization. Actually we could have started at Essen-Horst. It was just a question of train connection that made me choose Essen-Steele. Probably rather a stupid decision in the end, because we could have been directly to the Ruhr river if we had arrived at Horst.

While walking along the Ruhr river, I noticed that the water was extremely clean there. There was no real beach, but it was so shallow that probably we can go into water in summer. Another nice discovery along the Ruhr river.

When we started walking, the weather was not so bad. The situation changed very quickly right before the break. We quickly quit the riverbank and went into Dahlhausen, a small city near the river. There we found this place, Pizzaland, which was clearly not run by Italians but had enough space for everyone inside. And fortunately enough for us, there was no one inside. The staff must have been overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of such a mass.

We had a short hilly section of nature after we left Dahlhausen. But we quickly came back to civilization and the hike went towards the end. The others must have had the feeling that we hardly walked in the nature.

At least Hattingen was a nice place, with a good old city center. Thomas and Conrad did a short tourist guide for us. At the end, we went to a nearby café. Hattingen is certainly going to be the destination again, probably in a few weeks. Thomas seems to know this region well, so I’ll look forward to his suggestions.