Hiking around Langerwehe
Around a month ago, there were a lot of people from Aachen joining the NRW hiking group (which I recently became an admin of) on FB, saying they learnt about this group during the university introduction week. The problem is, it is actually always super far away from Aachen and it made little sense for those people to join us. So I decided to make one near Aachen, even though it was not exactly in Aachen.
In the end apparently there was no one joining from Aachen, but still there was a significant crowd today. And this crowd from Düsseldorf almost missed the train connection at Cologne, as our train, almost like always, had a delay of around 20 min.
We’ve been to the Eifel and Aachen a few times, actually already so many times that both areas have totally superposed hiking tracks. However, we have never visited anything in between, mainly because I thought it’s just flat, and also because I thought it wouldn’t be possible to go there with the VRS ticket. From what I learned today, apparently the VRS ticket allows you to go there, and take one person with you.
I was a bit surprised when the hike started, as the track was not totally flat. It doesn’t mean that it was like in the Eifel, but still it was nowhere too boring to hike in this period of the year.
Rohith told me some time ago there’s this castle called Laufenberg, which happened to be right next to where we were supposed to walk, so I included it in the trail today. There was a café inside, but as Rohith also pointed out, it was more for an easy going group that wants to chill in the area.
There were a few muddy places along the way, even though it didn’t rain for probably more than a week now. And sometimes the path hardly existed. But the forest was relatively well maintained so whenever it was a bit complicated we just had to go to the side and then everything was fine.
A small highlight of the day: Toy horse that we allegedly should not feed. I wonder whether they can legally sue us for feeding it.
We had a break at Schevenhütte, because I saw there were several restaurants there. I’m not even sure if there was something open. Anyway we stayed in a small park there.
Oh there’s something I was particularly happy about today: there were a few Russian-speaking people joining again. There is still no one from Ukraine, but I hope they’ll find out soon that politics plays no role in this group. I mean, the problem is probably much more complicated than that, but simply refraining from everything is probably not a solution, so I’d love them to see it as a good opportunity.
The rest of the day was just as flat as I had originally imagined. There were also a lot of fields and asphalted roads. I’m sure people wouldn’t have been very happy if the whole day was like this.
Now it’s summer, which means the weather changes sometimes very quickly. Today, we had a quick shower right before we reached the train station. I was totally unprepared (neither were many people). We stayed below a roof at a nearby house for some time and when the rain got weaker, we walked towards the train station.
When the rain started, however, we could smell the fresh rain after a long period of dry weather. It was a super nice refreshing moment that you can sometimes enjoy in the summer. Summer is back everyone 🙂
There was unfortunately no ice cream at the end of the hike today, because the train station was too small and we also decided to go to Düsseldorf to have dinner together :(. Next time!
