Hiking around Detmold!

It’s been a few months now since Hilal moved to Osnabrück. Still, probably because he struggles to find new contacts in the small city there, he comes back very often to Düsseldorf and surrounding areas and also sometimes he organizes hiking events around here. This time, he decided to organize a hike around Detmold, to go to Hermannsdenkmal. We have been to Hermannsdenkmal three times. I really like it there because it’s a beautiful area.

So the drama always starts on the train. This time it was somewhat unique: Originally, our train was supposed to go over the major train stations in the Ruhr area, such as Essen, Bochum, Dortmund etc. Due to police activity, they decided to skip these train stations, and instead go over other train stations in the north, such as Altenessen and Gelsenkirchen. So people coming from Essen or Bohum had to find a way to reach Altenessen etc. to join us on the train. This already caused quite some panic, but the problem didn’t end here: When we reached Duisburg, they decided to take the original route, going over Essen, Bochum etc., meaning those who went to Altenessen etc. had to come back to Essen, Bochum etc. That was already impossible, since the train was already in Duisburg. With this, we lost all the participants coming from the Ruhr area. Good job German Railway.

Otherwise the train journey went according to the plan. At Herford, where we changed trains, we also had a possibility of having a cup of coffee. Then we continued our journey to Detmold. At the train station, Hilal found a locker to store his stuff, which he needed over the weekend to stay at our place, but didn’t need for the hike. I didn’t expect a small train station like Detmold to have such a thing. Surprise surprise. Anyway, then we started hiking.

In contrast to the previous hikes, we had a rather long track going through the city of Detmold this time. I thought it was a very very small city, but today I found out that it has a quite some stretch. And it was also not totally flat. That was a bit of a surprise for me.

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that this area in the north of North Rhine-Westphalia is generally quite flat, except for this mountain range called Teutoburger Wald. There are multiple famous locations here, such as Externsteine or aforementioned Hermannsdenkmal. So it’s totally worth walking around, but it’s just very difficult to reach from Düsseldorf, except for Bielefeld. Since we already explored the area around Bielefeld, now we don’t go to that area very often anymore.

Once the city area was over, we could see a lot of fields, with some forests every now and then. The nature itself is not so different from, let’s say, Wuppertal, but the amount of people totally was – we saw some people maybe every half an hour or so. Otherwise we were always the only ones. That feels very weird when you are used to hikes around Düsseldorf.

We had our first break when we saw a nice view over a field in the forest. It was around one third of the way, but we still decided to have a break because in the at the two third we were going to see the Hermannsdenkmal.

Right after we had a break, we realized that there was a kind of a nice lake where we could have had a break. Pity. As a matter of fact, there were multiple locations like this today. I don’t really understand why we had a break there.

We were a group of 6 people today. It felt extremely small, especially after last week’s very large group. Shakuntala apparently really liked it, since she was saying she felt lost last week. There were a lot of occasions where we were silent though :).

There was a former shooting site as well. It was meant to be an important sight. Well, I don’t know how important it was.

When we reached Hermannsdenkmal, there were all of a sudden a lot of people around us, which makes sense since it’s a very famous site. We walked around it a little bit, ate some berries, and walked up to the monument. It was very sunny in this moment, so we quickly took a group photo and left.

There is a restaurant at the site. Since it was fairly tight to the next train, we decided to sit there and enjoy the day. I had a sprite. Those alcoholic days are over for me.

We then walked back to the city, had some ice cream and left the city. The ice cream was to be honest so so. There was a nicer place before, but it was closed today. Anyway, we had one, so I don’t complain 🙂