Hiking around Overath

This week, all the other organizers are somehow elsewhere, and so there was not so much pressure on me to organize a challenging hike. So I put one in Overath, which lies right next to Cologne. It’s an area that we visit every now and then, but rather rarely in the summer when we want a challenging hike.

For the first time I used the full capability of my new bot, which can now write the event description only based on the Komoot URL and the train connection. I don’t know if it was because of this, or simply because of the great weather forecast that a lot of people joined today. Anyway people seemed to like the fact that there was the full description in the Telegram announcement. The whole thing became very easy for me as well.

As always, I arrived at Düsseldorf Hbf in the last minute, when the train was actually already there. So I didn’t realize how many people were already there. It became clear only when we were changing trains at Cologne Messe, when I saw a rather large group at the platform. The group became even larger when we arrived at Overath, because we hadn’t seen the people joining from Cologne Hbf when we got on the train. We were basically blocking the entire platform at Overath. I saw some people that got off at Overath as well, who were not related to our group. They looked super confused. I can understand.

We have been to Overath a few times, but I think usually we were going to the main side of the train station. This time we got out from the other side and started hiking. It looked like there was really nothing at the train station on this side, even though the main side has a lot t offer. Accordingly, it took also only a few minutes to reach the nature.

Right at the beginning, there were some berries. Not all of them are ready, but some of then were just right. They didn’t taste extremely good, but good enough. Finally the berry season arrived!

There were a lot of new people today. As I saw that there were quite some asphalted sections today, I was not so sure if this hike was going to be attractive enough. In the end, I guess it was not so bad; it’s true that it was asphalted towards the beginning, but we were still in the nature. Frankly the ground probably wouldn’t have mattered too much.

In fact, the situation became really complicated once the ground was not solid anymore. Apparently it rained a lot around this area, which was also a bit the case around Düsseldorf, and it was partly very muddy. So muddy that I almost started regretting that I didn’t bring my proper hiking shoes. Fortunately I didn’t get a problem, but I’m sure that some people got wet shoes today.

It was quite sunny today. Actually so sunny that you would be afraid of the temperature. But this year somehow we are experiencing a rather cold summer with a lot of rain, and today was just like the weather recovered. So even though it’s full summer and with a beautiful sky, it was not too hot. What a brilliant day.

Overath lies in the area right next to Cologne. It’s more or less the first station where you can see a bit of mountains. Today’s hike was fairly moderate, with a bit of up and down. I’m kind of glad that we had a rather simple hike compared to the ones in the previous weeks. Somehow the other organizers really like challenging hikes. I like them too, but it’s also nice to have a rather simple one like today’s every now and then.

I thought I followed only official hiking trails, but some paths were very wild. It looks like not many people hike around here.

If you look at the map, you will notice that there’s a detour towards the middle. That was because there was a campsite with a restaurant nearby. Otherwise there’s not much of a reason to go there. As it turned out, almost everyone took a shortcut, because they found a nice grass field to have a break. I had expected to go to the restaurant, but still somehow I took my picnic blanket with me, which totally made sense. We were first sitting in the sun, but then it still got kind of hot, so we moved to a shadowy area.

As I already stated above, today’s trail was not very long. This shortcut made it even shorter. People were actually wondering when the hike ended today. This being said, we did at least 14 km. That’s actually not so short compared to the hikes we used to do a few years ago. What changed over time?

At Overath, we decided to not take a train immediately. Instead we went to a nearby ice cream shop, and stayed there to enjoy a great weather. Then we went back home. From my perspective it was still a nice day!