Hiking around Engelskirchen

It was only last year that we started to hike in the VRS area and now I’m starting to understand which areas I like and which ones I don’t. Engelskirchen, which was our destination today, is one of my favorite so far. It’s a pity that there aren’t so many train stations nearby, but at least I have been able to organize a few already and there’ll still be a few more to come.

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And as the VRR summer promotion is still going ahead, I put the event for Düsseldorf, hoping to be able to travel for free the entire day (which is also what happened).

It was again a good weather, but it looks like the summer is already over. While watching the river Agger along the railway line I had to think about something like this. I have thought about combining hiking with swimming in the river, but it hasn’t happened so far.

Along this railway line, Engelskirchen is probably one of the biggest cities, but it didn’t take us more than 15 min to cross the entire city and enter the nature.

More than the fact that it was relatively hilly today, it was a massive forest. Quite interestingly, the forest looked like a mixture of the Eifel and the Sauerland: The trees looked more like the ones in the Sauerland, but the damages done to the forest from the droughts of the recent years were clearly less. So when we were in the forest, we were often indeed in the middle of a dense forest. This being said, there were some areas badly hit as well.

Much of today’s trail didn’t follow an established hiking trail. As it turned out, especially the paths without official tags were the best ones. Maybe I just should mention that the path before the restaurant Wald-Eck didn’t really exist, so you have to take the concrete road right next to it (where there’s hardly any traffic so you don’t need to worry about it).

During the break I fell asleep. I woke up mainly because it was too cold. I had long trousers and a jacket. How’s possible that today is the first day of August.

Some of us then went to the restaurant. This one, just like many others after corona, was badly short of staff. We waited for 15 min and no one came to take our order. We simply gave up and went. Still we are glad that we could use the restroom :).

We were then mostly crossing a forest after the break. There was a military area along the path, which was obviously properly fenced.

Right before we reached Engelskirchen again, I could see the Agger one more time. There was also a proper access to the river from there. If the weather is going to be good again, we can go back there.