Hiking around Marienheide

This year, the summer came some time in June, when I was not in Germany, for a short while and apparently it’s entirely gone. Often we get another period of small heatwave towards in September in such a year, but at least for now it looks like that’s how we’re gonna remember 2021. It’s actually a pity that I created quite a few hiking routes which include the possibility to swim. One of them was today’s one, and after last year’s hike around Marienheide, I was quite looking forward to this one.

Download kml / gpx

Just like in many places towards the Sauerland, Marienheide was particularly difficult to reach. From Cologne we had to take a train for nearly an hour and a half.

Again, following yesterday’s dynamics, probably because I posted photos of the events recently in the FB group, there were a lot of new people in the group today. The problem is, they obviously didn’t know that I’d leave the station right away. I was walking with Felipe all alone with no one following us for quite some time. Usually I don’t care when this kind of stuff happens because I know that they would realise that the trip had already started and some people have the map, but since nothing seemed to happen, I started sharing my location. Well, still I didn’t see most of the people until the break today :D. So folks, please don’t expect me to give a call to everyone, especially during corona.

It was a rather flat landscape today, but kind of nice landscape very often. Already towards the beginning, we could go along one of the two lakes we wanted to visit today, where it is in fact officially allowed to swim. It’s so weird to see such a nice lake for free in Germany.

But this is the Sauerland, and as expected, there were vast areas ravaged by the drought of some years ago. It’s a weird photo with such a great sky.

Even though there was hardly an official hiking trail today, it was actually fairly good everywhere. We were mostly walking on or along fields. It might have been good, in the end, that we were not there in the middle of a heatwave, as there was nowhere to seek protection from the sun.

We had a break at the same lake as last year. I kept saying that it was not very warm, but with 25 degrees it was warm enough for me to enter the water. While I was swimming, people arrived little by little, until I realised that it was actually a very large group today. Here on the photo you see only part of the group.

As you can easily see on the trail above, we made a lot of detours, mainly in order to increase the distance to the train station.

Just like last year, we could get an ice cream at the end of the hike (not particularly a good on though), where we realised that while buying the ice cream we had actually missed the train :D. We simply stayed in a nearby pizzeria and waited for the next one. Marienheide was a comfortable place to stay, so maybe there’s a good reason that there’s a train only once an hour.