Hiking around Lennep

So now it’s official: summer is over.

With a lot of hope, I put an event for today in Lennep, which has Wuppertalsperre nearby, where we can in principle swim. As the day got closer, and the possibility of being able to swim getting slimmer, I changed the track entirely, in order to keep the original track for the next year. But also they were announcing rain for almost an entire day, so I thought it would be better to offer a trail with a proper restaurant on the way.

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Regarding the temperature, I did the right thing: it reached barely 20 degrees. On the other hand, the weather stayed fairly okay throughout the day. I don’t think there was even a single drop of rain today. Anyway, it was more like autumn.

This group has never been particularly well organized, but today I reached the train station literally in the last minute, where people were fortunately already on the train. When we arrived in Lennep, we realized that those from Cologne had already started hiking. Hiking might be a German tradition. I wonder how much Germanness we’re still keeping here.

Just like always, we went through the city of Lennep first to reach the nature. Then there was a relatively dense forest. It is an area with quite a few lakes for the drinking water. And therefore the nature is largely untouched. This is also something you can  observe by looking at the trees: While in many places in the Ruhr area the trees are perfectly aligned, here they are standing more randomly.

Maybe for a similar reason there are not many existing hiking trails in this area. I made the trail following forest paths. These paths were actually much more frequented than I initially thought. And maybe there were more bikes than hikers there.

We had a restaurant along the highway right next to a large lake, where we had a break today. We’ve been there once, and it was really the perfect place for a break, maybe except for the fact that the highway was actually quite noisy.

I have to say, the unofficial paths that I took were better than many of the existing hiking paths. It might actually be a good idea to propose a new hiking trail in this area.

And we had our traditional ice cream as well at the end of the hike :).