Hiking around Mechernich

Today I did something for the first time: I joined a hike that someone else organized. Well, it’s not literally true, because last summer I cycled with Amalia to Wuppertalsperre to join Hilal’s hike. This time, however, it’s not a partial participation, but I’m fully joining the hike of someone else’s. The reason is because Rohith somehow wanted to organize a hike this week, and as I had already said, it’s always welcome if people want to organize a hike. After all, I started doing it because there was no fitting group for me. If I don’t need to organize a hike, that’s actually even better.

This being said, joining a full hike doesn’t mean I join it from the beginning to the end – at Cologne, I went to a café to get a coffee while changing trains, and I missed the connection. I think it’s the very first time that I missed a train, after 7 years of hiking. Maybe I lost my sense of responsibility because I’m not the one organizing it this time.

Fortunately, there was another train leaving just half an hour later, and I managed to make a much shorter hike, so it was not a huge problem to catch up.

As I was arriving late, I tried to shorten the trip. Somehow Komoot decided to reverse the direction while I was doing it, and I was only shortening the ending part. I don’t quite understand why it did that.

Anyway, Amalia, who was waiting or me at the train station, and I started hiking while trying to figure out how to shorten the trip. It was a very beautiful area with a lot of trees. Some places were a little bit tricky because of the recent rainy days.

There was a large field towards the beginning. We had to cross it when it started raining quite badly and it got pretty windy.

We reached the group when we had a break in front of a castle. We had believed that it was a public castle, but it turned out to be a private one. It was a pity that we could not visit it.

On the way back, we realized the trail was going through an open air museum. It’s a kind of museum where you can experience historical activities, such as how to make medieval meals and so on. I know what kind of place it was, because there are many of them in Germany, but Rohith, who organized the trip, apparently did not know that it was not free of charge. So we took a detour, which ended up shortening the hike quite massively.

Around this time it also started raining a little bit. I’m so looking forward to our trip to Crete next week.

The final part, therefore, was mostly concrete. If you are interested in the open air museum, it might be indeed interesting to take the trail as suggested above (I placed it without modification).

As there was a train coming when we got to the train station, we did not have ice cream in Mechernich. Instead we got some at Cologne, where I could have a really nice conversation with Pranay, who is from India and has been to Mexico and is very much interested in the Latino culture. Such an interesting guy. Ah and the ice cream was also great. I cannot complain 🙂