Hiking around Bad Münstereifel

First my personal stuff: I got married, which was also the reason why I was away for three weeks. Amalia and I had a wonderful wedding in Japan and a great time following the wedding. So much so that she didn’t need today’s hike, she was saying. I joined anyway, also because I was afraid of falling asleep if I was staying at home.

While I was away, the hikes continued. And today’s one was organised by Rohith. Apparently except for me no one has a problem with riding a bus. So today we took a bus from Euskirchen to Bad Münstereifel, where we hiked in 2020. There was a flood in 2021, and ever since the train service stopped. I really hope it’s gonna be restored at some point because I really hate riding a bus….

While I was away, Germany totally entered winter. I took my thin pullover today, and was freezing whenever we were not moving. But at the same time the trees were still quite beautiful with the autumn colours.

To be honest I was quite sleepy the whole time, and couldn’t particularly enjoy the hike, but still I appreciated the distance of around 15 km today. With Rahul and Davy organizing a lot of hikes in the summer, I started getting used to the hikes with over 20 km, but in winter I prefer shorter hikes with around 15 km, because the landscape is less interesting and therefore I get really bored at some point when the distance is too long.

It was nowhere totally flat today, but the slopes were also really gentle. I don’t know whether Rohith did it intentionally or not, but it was a kind of winter hike that I usually call it. Well done.

As the name suggests, Bad Münstereifel lies inside the Eifel. So the nature is quite massive, but there’s also nothing really complicated. The weather was not particularly good in the beginning, but we could see the sun every now and then as well.

I was walking in the last group and by the time we reached the break, some people were already done with their lunch. Today frankly I got the feeling that there is now already some new order in the group, i.e. people know each other very well without me. That was a really weird feeling, but at the same time it’s also a good thing because it shows that things are working out really well.

As it was getting later, I was getting super sleepy. It’s indeed not really a great idea to hike just a day after you come back from Japan, although I can also say that compared to Amalia, who stayed at home and slept, I was probably doing somewhat better.

At the end of the hike, we arrived in Bad Münstereifel. Until that moment I had kind of totally forgotten that I had been there before. It’s actually a beautiful city worth visiting. However, there are still scars from the flood that it suffered from. In fact you can do a sort of catastrophe tourism there now. Don’t know how great it is though…

We found a nice ice cream shop in the city center. We could have taken a bus in half an hour but instead we waited for another bus coming one hour later. I was almost falling asleep, but somehow I managed to say awake till the end. Good job.