Hiking around Haltern!

It was a very cold week. There were even some moments with snow. I was thinking we really don’t want to do a complicated hike this week. Davy, who likes to organize longer hikes, in the meantime organized one in Cochem with around 20 km. Not so surprisingly, no one joined. I guess the problem is that hiking 20 km in winter is just too long for fun, but too boring as a sport. We got this very nice distance of around 15 km. Well, it’s actually fairly easy to control the distance around this area, because Haltern is basically surrounded by massive forests with paths going in every direction. We usually don’t go there, because it’s not quite nearby, and it’s fairly flat. This time, since it was cold and no Christmas market was anyway expected afterwards, I decided to organize it there.

The problem was that exactly today it got a lot warmer – going towards 16 degrees. Frankly we could have done a full hike today, but I guess people were also not really aware of it, so there would have been probably a lot less people if I had organized a more serious hike.

As always, I had to run to catch the train this morning. So there was no large group at the beginning, but as the train went through the Ruhr area, there were more and more people joining.

On the map it looks like the forest starts right next to the city, but it felt like we had to cross quite some civilization at the beginning. But when we entered the nature, we could see this typical nicely treated forest of the Ruhr area. There were also farms along the way.

I thought the area was totally flat, but it felt almost like we were hiking up and down on hills. I mean, it was definitely not a challenging hike, but it was still more than just a walk.

There was a tower right before we reached half of the track, which I had hoped was open to everyone. It was kind of open, but only the platform was closed. We took a few photos inside. Pity that they closed it.

Since the area was pretty nice, we decided to have a break there, even though it was a little bit too early. In the meantime, more people also started arriving. A relatively large group in the end.

We stayed in the same forest for some time after that – it turned out that there were more places where we could have had a lunch break. I was expecting a highlight along the lakes. That part turned out to be a disappointment. The road was asphalted, and there were a lot of bikes, on top of the fact that it was obviously quite flat.

After the hike, we went to the city center of Haltern am See for an ice cream. Quite unexpectedly, Haltern had a pretty city center, with a lot of ice cream parlors.