Hiking around Leichlingen

As you probably already all know, we have now this thing called Deutschlandticket, which allows us to travel everywhere around Germany on local trains. Before, we used to have smaller areas, like VRR VRS etc. As a matter of fact, this choice was somewhat unfortunate for us in Düsseldorf, because towards the south it was actually fairly limited. There’s this one station called Leichlingen, which can be easily reached by bike from Düsseldorf, but just because it was one stop after Solingen, where the VRR area ends, we couldn’t travel there for free. Now with the Deutschlandticket, finally we can travel there without having to think about it too much.

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At the same time, it’s not an area with a lot of stations, so I made a very long trail of more than 20km. Frankly I was not even expecting so many people today. In reality there were around 10 people, and maybe half of them new.

This area in the Rhineland is a very flat area. If you go towards Remscheid or Solingen, it starts getting hilly, but it looked almost absurd to hike there at the beginning. Also there were some bikers and the road was asphalted.

But it was still very nice to walk along the Wupper. This is one of very few rivers around Düsseldorf where the water is so clear that you can swim without concern.

As a matter of fact, today’s hike was almost always flat. There was just this one big hill in the first half, but I’d say it was just a normal hill. On the other hand, it had a nice viewing platform.

We had to do something like 14 km in order to reach the first break. That’s more or less the distance we do in winter for an entire hike. And quite obviously we needed smaller breaks along the way. It was easier to organize it in this small group.

We had a break in this small restaurant along the Wupper. It looked really nice when I looked it up while preparing the trail a few days ago. Indeed, it was a beautiful restaurant with possibilities of picnicking, and I could even enter the water (I regretted to not have taken my swimming stuff yesterday).

In total we had a very very long break. But hey, it was such a lovely day. We should enjoy it!

On the way back, I was really tired of walking on a flat surface. In addition, there were quite some e-bikers. And as always, they area really noisy…

But overall it was really a good idea to cycle along the Wupper. We will definitely go back there in the summer this year.