Hiking around Odenthal

There is this thing I really hate: bus. Fortunately, we can reach a lot of interesting places by train in North Rhine Westphalia, but I have to admit there are also many places that you can simply not reach by train. Apparently Rahul doesn’t have a problem with buses, and this time he decided to organize a hike at Odenthal.

I was surprised to see that there are so many people who didn’t have a problem either. Fortunately the bus that we took from Leverkusen was totally empty (I guess it was indeed starting from Leverkusen), so we occupied nearly the entire bus.

Last week it was freezing cold. It was not much better this week. Today the temperature was hovering around 0 degrees. Fortunately the weather was just extremely good. I don’t really understand what’s happening this winter.

It felt to me like a torture to stay on the bus. For Rahul, it must be a torture to be sitting next to me as I kept complaining.

If you look at the hiking track, you might get the feeling that the starting point doesn’t seem to be chosen appropriately. That’s because apparently Rahul wanted to go to the dome in the first village. It’s true that there were some nice spots from where you could take nice pictures.

The landscape was very similar to that of Solingen. We walked first along a small stream for very long time. It was pretty nice, but I still don’t really understand why we had to take a bus to see the same landscape.

Towards the beginning there was a couple walking close to us. They happened to know our group and told us that they’d join some time in the future. It’s nice to meet people along the way that know us 😀

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that Davy and I walked 30 km yesterday. We were slightly slow for my taste, but I still think we did a great job. Unfortunately, it was probably a little bit too much for him so he didn’t join today, but I still managed it, and I didn’t really feel anything from yesterday. Maybe we can even create an official event in the near future.

Rahul had apparently planned a place for the break, but we decided to have it earlier, because we found a nice place in the field. Just like last week I brought my cooking stuff to put their coffee and tea. This time Patrick has basically the same equipment because in the meantime, he bought the same carbon fiber with ethanol so you are basically using the same thing twice to prepare coffee twice. Now I start understanding why Amalia finds it so stupid. As we were preparing the stuff in the field, there was quite some wind . Fortunately, I brought my windshield this time so it went very well.

Again, I would like you to see this beautiful blue sky. Who would have expected such a thing!

Unfortunately we had just missed the bus to go back to Leverkusen. So we went to a nearby hotel for coffee, ice cream, waffles etc. Even though the place was quite fancy, the staff were super nice. My ice cream was also only 4€. That’s pretty ok.

We then had Chinese food in Düsseldorf afterwards. It was the perfect time for us to be there. So nicely organized!