Hiking around Altena

Yesterday was the last day of the Ramadan, meaning for people like Hilal it gets a lot easier to hike now. Also it’s getting a lot warmer these days, so we are ready to go a bit farther away. In addition, we are going to hike in Essen next week, because of the official event of the city of Essen, which is around 26 km. So we argued that today’s hike was a preparation for this. Well, I don’t know whether this logic really works, as the hike in Essen is going to be very flat, while Altena is famous for the hilly landscape.

Anyway, there were quite a few people joining today, probably again because of Meetup, despite the large distance, also despite the relatively cold and windy weather today. Impressive.

For some reason, the train station of Altena is very far away from the city of Altena. Not only it’s the other side of the river, but also you have to walk quite some distance to get there. I don’t really get it, but anyway the first thing we had to do was therefore to cross the bridge. It was so windy that we were not quite steadily walking.

From the bridge, you can see the famous Altena castle. I’ve taken so many photos of this thing, but I do it anyway again, just like everyone else, because it feels now like it’s part of the routine.

Today’s track followed a very simple altitude profile – it went up at the beginning, and then down towards the end. So even though it was a hilly area and nice views every now and then, it was not particularly difficult. Obviously it was still somewhat difficult at the beginning when we had to go up a relatively long hill.

When we reached the plateau, it started raining a little bit. I had taken my umbrella with me, but because of the wind it was totally useless. Otherwise I was not prepared at all, and I got fairly wet, as we were also walking in a large field with no tree nearby.

There was this airfield that I’m so used to by now. There was no plane today, but some people seemed quite impressed today.

Fortunately the weather drastically got better after this moment. Even the sun started appearing every now and then. We found a nice table somewhere on the way in this moment, so we decided have a break there. I had brought the fire cooking kit again, so I prepared coffee and tea. Pretty nice 🙂

There were some attractions towards the end, like figures, monuments and so on. Altena is one of the shrinking cities, so maybe they are trying to make it more attractive.

There was one path with one sign saying it’s a pedestrian path, with the other saying no walking. I don’t really understand the logic.

We then went to the castle at Altena, which I was talking about above. Just like recently, it was for free, which wasn’t the case some years ago. This time, we even visited the tower, in the hope to be able to have a beautiful view. That was unfortunately not the case, but it was still a nice experience. There was also a super clean toilet. Nice

We then went to the city to get an ice cream. I have to say it was not quite the summer feeling today, even though in my case it doesn’t really depend on that. Let’s see how it’s gonna be in the upcoming weeks.