Hiking around Bad Münstereifel

It was right after the hike two weeks ago, that someone posted the link to a VRR promotion, which I first didn’t really understand – free ride everywhere in NRW? That was pretty much what was written, and it turned out it was very much true. Until the end of school holidays, you can go everywhere on weekends with your monthly ticket if it’s on subscription. In addition, you can even take a person everywhere in NRW. Within a few minutes, I changed all the plans for this weekend and put trips outside of VRR. Today, we went to Bad Münstereifel, which is on the edge of NRW, an area that may or may not lie in the Eifel.

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As the weather forecast continued giving gloomy predictions, the number of participants didn’t grow much. Still, it was clear that there’d be at least something like 25 people. In the end, we must have been something like 30 or maybe more people. As soon as we arrived in Bad Münstereifel, I started walking, without really looking back, since we had to cross this small city and I didn’t want to attract too much attention.

In order to come to Bad Münstereifel, we had to change at Euskirchen. That’s an extremely boring area when it comes to hiking. I was not quite sure about Bad Münstereifel. It turned out to be a little bit like Hagen – there are complicated mountains, but mostly it was wild. It was almost surprising that they decided to call it a hiking trail, because except for the tags that indicated the trails, there was really nothing that made it resemble to a real hiking trail. It’s maybe just a question of definition, or difference of mentality between VRR and VRS.

Among those who joined, I had the feeling I knew maybe 1/3. I guess indeed 2/3 of the people joined for the first time. Many of them were from Bonn. It’s true that the fact that I put the location of the hike as the event location probably changes the participants quite a lot.

It indeed drizzles a little bit at the beginning. But throughout the day, it was quite okay. With around 20 degrees it was the perfect weather today for a hike.

When I saw the height difference of 200 m, I first thought it could be a rather complicated hike today. Besides, there was quite a long way to go before the break. But in reality, I didn’t have the feeling that it was particularly hard today. Maybe because of the temperature, maybe because the slope was rather regular.

We had a break at this small town called Eicherscheid. Since we had a nice grass field, some of us stopped there. Some others went to the town to have proper lunch. Whenever we try to find a place to have a break, we often enter the town and start wondering what to do, but today we did pretty well to search beforehand, which gave us that grass field. I should do it like this every time.

I’m relatively sure that the fact that I left the grass field to get a cup of coffee at a nearby Mongolian restaurant gave other people the impression that we were about to leave. So while we were having a coffee some people started walking farther, apparently not quite realising that we were sitting in the restaurant. We didn’t really find them anymore for the rest of the day, which is the reason why the group photo is with so few people today.

I had an huge number of ticks today. I could have carried long trousers since the temperature was not quite high.

I was talking almost all the time with one particular person after the break, so that I didn’t quite pay attention to what was happening around me. There were still nice places like this river every now and then. It’s hard to see clean water around Düsseldorf, but here in the Eifel (?) you can find it.

When we came back to Bad Münstereifel in the end, the train was about to leave, but we didn’t want to lose the opportunity to see this beautiful town so we decided to take a train one hour later. Most of the people went back home without making it to the group photo. Well, there was anyway no proper group photo, but I hope still you like the photo above :).