Hiking around Eppstein

After the hike around Bensheim, where I was all alone, I thought I might not organise any hike around Frankfurt anymore. This time, however, I had a business trip to Berlin from Monday (meaning arrival Sunday evening), so that I didn’t need to buy a return ticket from Frankfurt. So I decided to give it another try. This time a bit closer to Frankfurt central, because I thought last time it may have been a bit too far away for those who wanted to join for the first time.

Download kml / gpx

This time, there was this one guy, Omkar, who used to join us on our hikes in NRW, who now lives in Frankfurt, who saw the event on FB and invited a few people, so that it became quite promising all of a sudden.

There have been a lot of incidents with the German railway. This morning, however, I got a particularly powerful one: the fast track between Cologne and Frankfurt was blocked, so that my ICE did a detour that cost 90 min. In my initial plan, I was meant to arrive at Frankfurt around 60 min earlier than the train departure, but due to this disaster I didn’t make it to the train connection in the end. I think it was the very first hike where I couldn’t even make it to the first train. There was by the way this one British guy next to me on the train, who looked totally perplexed, because our train had a 90 min delay all of a sudden, even though we arrived in Düsseldorf and Cologne in time. And since this guy was going to Frankfurt to catch his flight (just like many other people on the train, because this was a rail&fly train), which he missed, he had to learn bitterly the real face of Germany. I’m sorry to hear that.

The others waited for me for the train 30 min later. So nice of them. We then got on the S-Bahn and went to Eppstein, where we were joined by one more guy. We were 6 in total. That’s less than our 2nd hike in NRW back in 2017 (where we were 9), but it’s still something isn’t it?

Eppstein had a castle in the city center, which was not so surprisingly closed. We then left the city and entered the nature.

There’s this region called Taunus, which I know is a very forestal area. As a matter of fact, we were surrounded by trees the whole day. The trees in this area are also so high, that it didn’t really matter how steep it was, it was really difficult to see the surrounding area.

We climbed up a long hill at the beginning. At some points it was a little bit steep, but it was easily manageable for all of us, even though many of us actually didn’t look like professional hikers 🙂

There was a small hut on the way, where we had a short break. Then we walked towards the top of the mountain. Again, the surrounding trees were so high that we could hardly see the areas far away.

Since we already had a 30-min delay, and some people wanted to have a break, we didn’t go to the end of the loop, but took a small shortcut on the way. Anyway, I had added a small section in the north only because the total length would be too short, so there was nothin particularly interesting to see there.

There we found another hut, where we could have actually even organized BBQ. Pity that we didn’t know that beforehand.

We were supposed to go through the city of Eppenheim, but we decided to skip it altogether, because it was only meant for the restaurant and otherwise there was simply no interest.

From the hill next to Eppstein, it was actually really beautiful. Only this construction work disturbed the view a bit.

In Eppstein, we went to a café in the city center. There was no ice cream, but still it was a nice ending. Frankly I’m really thankful to Omkar that he brought those nice guys today. I’m really looking forward to coming back to Frankfurt in the near future.