Hiking around Merten

Summer is over. It was a short period of time this year.

Obviously I’m just joking, and probably also totally exaggerating, because not only the weather is usually not particular good (yet) in this period of time, but also yesterday and today, it didn’t rain, while it rained nearly the whole week and apparently from Monday on. So in this sense, there’s hardly anything I should be complaining about.

Download kml / gpx

Actually today the weather was even better than yesterday, and since it was much closer to Düsseldorf/Cologne/Bonn, there were also accordingly much more people joining.

We’ve hiked in this area a few times. It’s a typical Bergisches Land area – it has a lot of nature, but not quite as wild as in the Sauerland. In this area, I can comfortably organise hikes both in winter and in summer. The photo above is right after the train station. It’s within a few minutes from the civilisation. Isn’t is amazing?

It’s amazing to see how the landscape changed within a day. Well, we’re not in the middle of the Sauerland anymore, but just looking at the photos it gives the impression that we’re going towards the summer … well maybe except for the fact that the trees are not particularly green yet.

There were some spots today, where I thought it was good that there wasn’t quite as much snow as yesterday. The path on the photo above is a good example. On the other hand, in today’s good weather, it was actually the perfect place to be (because it was so narrow).

We had a break in Winterscheid. There was a restaurant there, but I guess we all stopped at the local church, because it had a super nice garden (even though it was also a graveyard at the same time…). I prepared some Japanese soup on the spot. It was difficult to cook properly today, as it was actually windier than I had imagined.

It’s almost becoming my obsession to take photos of places which became barren after the drought of 2017 and 2018. Just like always, here in the Bergisches Land it wasn’t quite as bad as in the Sauerland, but still you can clearly see the scars. Yesterday it was covered in snow, but today it just looked sad.

Quite obviously, there was no ice cream parlour in Merten. We directly took a train back to Cologne and had an ice cream there. By the way, it’s a totally personal thing, but today I was forced to learn Arabic and now I can say I ate ice cream in Arabic: Alket ice cream. Thank you for your attention.