Hiking around Iserlohn

Just like always, we are nearing the end of the year. And with the arrival of the end of the year, there’s something we usually look forward to: Christmas markets. Since there are only a few weekends where we can visit the Christmas markets, there are still so many of them that I would still want to see. Today, we went to Iserlohn, which is a weirdly isolated city still connected to the railroad by this dangling line coming from Letmathe. The city is lovely, but it’s almost a wonder that they kept this line. Anyway, I’m grateful that it’s still there.

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As I’m now working in the university of Bochum once a week, I got a monthly ticket that allows me to go up to Dortmund. There’s still this NRW promotion that allows you to go everywhere in NRW on weekends if you have a monthly ticket on subscription. Since mine is not on subscription, it shouldn’t allow me to go beyond Dortmund. However, the inspectors were visibly not interested in this. Frankly, with the already too many tickets, I don’t think it’s a good idea to create more confusions by introducing more distinctions.

The city of Iserlohn is to the north of the train station. As soon as we arrived in Iserlohn, we walked to the south, where there are mountains. This is basically the edge of the Sauerland, even though today’s area was fairly mild. We went up a somewhat long slope to reach a relatively high point at the beginning. There wasn’t much up and down after this today.

There were a few view points at the beginning. Well, the trees have already mostly lost their leaves by now. It was also a very cold day – I should probably rather be happy about the fact that it didn’t rain, because this period of the year in this region brings a lot of rain, which somehow happened to be not on weekends this year.

Some people went for some reason far ahead of us almost right from the beginning. I thought we could see them during the break, but we ended up not seeing them at all. Apparently they also had a break for only 10 min or so and didn’t even go to the Christmas market.

We had a break in our usual place in Iserlohn, where there’s a restaurant in the middle of the forest. We simply stayed outside, because the outside area is actually also quite nice.

If you look at the map above, you might notice that after the break, there’s a place where we cross the street. I included that part because the hike was too short otherwise. It was also a little bit improvised, as it was not really an official hiking path. This part might have been actually the most interesting today, because it was just wilder.

At the end, we went directly to the Christmas market. Just as I expected, it was a very small one for the small city of Iserlohn. These small Christmas markets are simply the best in Germany. We had some hot wine and overpriced potatoes champignons etc. Then we took a train back home, which was more than overcrowded and had a huge delay. Good job German railway.