Hiking around Altenbeken!
Last year and two years ago, I organized hikes on Saturdays and Sundays mostly in order to avoid having large groups. With the corona pandemic apparently converging, it’s not really necessary anymore. But this year I decided to visit places far away from Düsseldorf, so I am probably going to organise events yet again on Saturdays and Sundays, and hopefully we’re gonna travel far on Saturdays and on Sundays we’ll stay nearby. Today was essentially the first day with this new plan and we went to Altenbeken. One great thing about Altenbeken is that there’s now a direct connection between Düsseldorf and Kassel which goes over Altenbeken. One disadvantage is the fact the train was leaving at 7:36… Anyway, since I didn’t want to change trains, I took this connection.
So in this regard, there was no surprise that there was hardly anyone joining from Düsseldorf. There was just one more person joining us in Dortmund and the rest was from Paderborn. In total, we were 7. It’s been a long time since we had this few people.
I went to Altenbeken a few times on my own. It’s just a super small place which I don’t really understand could possibly be an ICE station. So we walked only a few minutes leave the city. It looked also like we were the only ones in the street anyway though.
It’s March, but it’s still more like winter. The trees were still fairly leafless. At the same time we could see that the area is in the continuation of the Sauerland, i.e. there were areas where the trees were totally removed.
Even if this area was not totally flat, it was not particularly hilly here either. So you can in principle expect a relatively easy path wherever you go, but at the same time it’s also true that there are far less people living nearby, so that some trails are not quite well maintained. It gave a bit of flair of adventure today, just like you can see on the photo above.
We had a break in a small village called Buke. There was also a restaurant but no one actually went there. For a group of 7 people it was easy to find a place for the break. Since it was actually really cold, we started walking fairly quickly.
There were some trees at the beginning, but half of today’s hike was in fields, just like on the photo above. It felt a little bit like around Velbert, but larger. It was nice to be in such a large field on such a sunny day.
It was around 2:30pm when we were back in Altenbeken. Since it was super early, we wanted to grab a beer after the usual ice cream, but except for the ice cream parlour everything was closed, so we simply took a train back home. It was a nice comfortable hike today, more like a winter hike than a summer one.
