Hiking around Rolandseck

Things sometimes go bananas in life, but that’s mostly an individual thing. It’s certainly rare that this applies to an entire society. That’s what happened after the last hike. And even though the signs were everywhere, I’m pretty sure that many of us didn’t think that it would go so far.

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Right after that hike, everything in the city went silent, one after another. Yet this was not a question of week or month, everything came to standstill within a few hours on Monday. Seeing more than one person became impossible, which forced me to stop organising hikes. I was quite okay with that, but apparently not everyone was. Anyway, now things look slightly better and the government decided to loosen the restrictions, which made it possible for us to organise outdoor sport events, with social distancing rules still in place. This became somewhat an object of ridicule and scorn, but rules are rules, there’s nothing we should be afraid of as long as we follow them.

With this in mind, I decided to put this event today. Quite obviously, this was the very first “real” event on meetup and probably also the only one over this weekend. For me, there was also this aspect of social experiment: How do people react in case of emergency? Especially, the German media has been claiming there are only assholes in the society, but that’s not what I’ve seen so far.

Just as a precaution, I created two different events on Saturday and Sunday at entirely different places, in order to disperse the people a little bit. Today, we came to Bonn, right in front of Königswinter across the Rhine, where we’ve already hiked twice. Königswinter and Siebengebirge are all extremely famous, but this side of the river is not quite known to many people. So far, I’ve been quite disappointed by Königswinter and Siebengebirge, because it looks exactly the same everywhere there. You’d never know whether you are advancing or going in a circle. So I didn’t have high expectations for today’s trail.

I’m pretty sure that some of the famous parks were overcrowded today. I could see a lot of people taking a train who looked like they were going to do some outside activities.

From the train station, it went directly uphill. I could see Drachenfels and other castles on the other side of the river (can you see them on the photo?). In contrast to my imaginary crowd over there, our side of the river was quite empty. In fact, over the course of the day we could see a few number of people, but never so many that we wouldn’t have been able to keep a social distance.

And as it turned out, there were not only less people here, but also the hiking trail itself was much more interesting than on the other side of the river. Later I could also see that it was either civilisation or massive forest on the other side, this side was more pastoral, making it more pleasant to walk farther.

Maybe because we were only 5 people, it was rather easy to stick to the rules. As I found out, 1,5 m is a very natural distance to me. Actually, it happens very often to me that people come to close to me every now and then regardless of corona. But with a 1,5 m distance I feel very comfortable. I presume that this distance is too large for many people.

We had a break in the middle of nowhere. Instead of a picnic blanket I took a foldable camping chair. This is actually a new gadget I got right before the lockdown started, when I went to Cologne to get hiking equipment. Then I somehow got this chair as well. And a few days back, I realised that my MacBook Pro can be charged with an external power bank, which you can also see on the photo, which means now I can go everywhere and start working, since my phone gives me the internet. Isn’t it great? As soon as the campsites start operating again, I’ll probably start travelling around Germany by bike and start home office in the nature.

We tried to take a group photo today with social distancing. If we do it well, we could look like a cover photo of band or something.

Since all the restaurants and everything was closed, we didn’t have our ice cream session today. We took a train back to Düsseldorf and the day was over.

Well, in total I was rather convinced that we can continue going hiking regularly. Let’s see how it’s gonna be tomorrow.