Hiking around Dortmund-Aplerbeck
Last year and two years ago, it seemed to me like it’s a good idea to bring about the concept of “winter hikes” – I thought it was sufficiently good to have outings to get fresh air. This year, it looks like the winter is never going to arrive. Now I wonder, whether now it’s spring, or we’re gonna see a dramatic return to the winter.
Anyway, today’s hike around Dortmund very much comes from the fact that on warm days this area is not interesting enough, but it’s a nice area to walk around on cold days, or at least this area on open street maps and google earth looked very much like a nice area in the middle of the industrial artefacts of the Ruhr area.
The train ride to Dortmund felt like forever, even though I’m very glad that it did not have a delay at all. Then we got this one Eurotrain for the first time that was supposed to go to Soest, to get to Dortmund-Aplerbeck.
Today’s trail contained a significant amount of city, not quite surprisingly. This Ruhr area is simply so endlessly extended. We entered the nature only slowly. The residential area somewhat faded out and we were at some point surrounded by trees.
The city center of Dortmund is of course entirely flat, but then when you go towards the Ruhr (which is the river that goes through the Ruhr area), it starts to become hilly. We were still fairly far away from the river today, but then apparently still close enough to feel some height difference, just good amount for a winter hike.
When you enter a restaurant in this kind of area, you have to be very careful, because the staff could be really extremely rude. This was very much the case today, when we came to this one restaurant called Blumenhain, where there were a lot of tables available, but we almost all got rejected, for no obvious reason (at least these tables stayed empty until we left the place). So if you take this trail, you should know where not to go.
But one way or other, if you are not hiking in the middle of the winter, there is pretty much no reason to take exactly this trail. I guess it’s fair to say we can be happy about not having any complicated part in winter, but then again if you want a proper hike, you might be interested in going to other places. I think it was a nice experience to have hiked in Dortmund for me, but I don’t think we’ll particularly be interested in coming back here in the near future.
Well, at the end of the hike we went back to Dortmund Hbf and crashed a local Turkish (?) bakery. Even though the order took something like an hour, it was a very nice place to stay in front of the train station.
Hiking from Hochdahl to Haan!
