Hiking around Bensberg

There is usually not much to be happy about with the trains in Germany. However, there was one positive development recently: the NRW-wide promotion for the ticket subscribers got extended, meaning we can travel everywhere inside NRW with any ticket on subscription. With this, we would in principle be able to go far away, but it looks like the nation wide ticket is going to come some time beginning of the year, so we don’t even need to take any risk to not find a ticket until then. With this in mind, we went to Bensberg this weekend, which lies right next to Cologne. It’s a nice area on the edge of the Bergisches Land. It’s easy to reach, but there’s still so much green.

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Maybe due to the weather, there were not so many people today. For some reason, there were almost only boys today. I don’t understand this dynamics.

There’s this vast forest right below Bensberg, which is extremely homogeneous and has no particular trait. So for the whole day, we were seeing more or less the same landscape. I took a few photos, and it’s nice to see trees with a bit of sun shine (which we call Komorebi in Japanese), but at the same time those photos look almost the same.

It stayed somewhat warm until last week, but today I could feel that those warm days are really over. I could have almost brought my small stove with me. Maybe from next week on I’m gonna do it, and we might have tea on the way 🙂

There’s this small detour you can see on the map. That’s where we had a break today. It was actually not easy to get there, but since there was only one restaurant in that area, there was also no other choice. Well, apparently almost no one went to the restaurant though.

For some reason, I was still extremely tired in the second half. Maybe because the distance was fairly long for a hike in the winter. Or maybe because it was extremely flat (for some reason, totally flat tracks are tiring as well).

We reached Bensberg and went back to Düsseldorf directly. It was around 4:30pm when we arrived there. So nice to hike nearby.