Hiking in Schwelm!

A couple days ago, the weather forecast was predicting a rainy weekend. And appropriately enough, Tuesday is the reunification day, which makes a long weekend for many people stretching from Saturday to Tuesday.

And just as predicted, it rained a lot on Saturday. On this day, however, there was Bhagyashree who wanted to go hiking. Even though she put me as an organizer too, I had already declined it beforehand, because it was a bit far away from Düsseldorf and I had to be back home early. It rarely rains whenever I go hiking, but on the two hikes that I did not attend, it rained a lot. So the contrary might also be the case (that it rains if I’m not there).

As you can easily guess, my strong luck was confirmed on Sunday again: it was the sunniest day of the week. When we were on the train we could feel the sunlight coming in all the time. Hopefully day after tomorrow will be similar, since we’re going to hike near Aachen towards the Belgian and Dutch border.

Despite the weather, there were actually not many people today. Probably because of the long weekend. I myself would have travelled if there was no hike, which is a weird thing because when I was still a student, I used to do expensive travels, going to Paris for example and staying in hotels. Now that I earn far more, I stay only nearby. And I’m still fully enjoying my holidays.

If you take a look at my entire map, you’ll notice that there are quite some trails concentrated around Schwelm, between Wuppertal and Hagen. Most of them were created recently, but we could not do the old ones during the summer vacation either, since the entire region was not accessible by train. And for this reason, I don’t have a clear idea of what it looks like here either. In this sense, this one hike was a particularly important one determining the hikes of the coming weeks.

And as it turned out, the landscape was pretty much the same as in the West of Wuppertal. Quite some forest, slopes and some farms in between. So the distance we covered, 15km, was about the maximum of what we all can do. If I can change one thing, maybe I should have chosen a path that directly leads to the forest. Just as we had the same problem in Mettmann (cf. this) recently, I didn’t think Schwelm was so large.

It’s a rather side story, but Sarah decided to celebrate her birthday in a restaurant. And for this, we went to Sichuan Restaurant, which is my favorite, because we can get authentic Sichuan food and all you can drink. It’s pretty much the unhealthiest place in Düsseldorf, and every time I regret to have ordered too much beer. This was particularly the case today. I was even not really sure if I’d go hiking. I did. And still I can’t believe I did it.

It’s been a couple of sessions that we’re having a break in the middle of nowhere. There must have been a restaurant nearby, and indeed some people also went there, but I don’t know exactly how close it was. It was good that we did this hike now, because in winter it would have been complicated, I guess.

We had these perfect Supermario mushrooms everywhere on the way today. I wonder whether I become taller if I eat them.

In the original plan, we were supposed to go to Schwelm West, which is a different train station. As many stations in this area, there was obviously nothing around the station. So I decided to make a slight change in the trail, so that we’d arrive at Schwelm. This kind of change doesn’t happen very often, but it might be an advantage that we’re quite flexible. I still don’t really like the fact that I’m acting like a dictator, but as long as we have nothing too complicated, maybe it’s fine.

Schwelm was somewhat larger than what we expected. And the city center had also some stuff to offer, fortunately. We could sit in an ice cream parlor comfortably. The tradition of ordering beer at an ice cream parlor had to be cancelled this time. I didn’t even want to think about alcohol.