Hiking around Ronsdorf!

“We’ve been to Ronsdorf recently. Why are we going there again?”

This was what I heard Hussain saying yesterday. Yes we went to Ronsdorf recently. And yes it’s not easy to access for anyone. The reason why I like Ronsdorf is simple: this area is the beginning of what is called “Sauerland”, which is a famous mountainous area, a perfect place for hikers. Even though Ronsdorf is technically outside Sauerland, its terrain is notably different from Düsseldorf (i.e. hilly). And maybe because it is not quite Sauerland, it is perfect for an amateur group like us.

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This morning, Valdemar’s train got cancelled, our train had a 5 min delay (although we could catch the connection at Wuppertal-Oberbarmen), those coming from Essen had a delay of 8 min by the time they arrived at Oberbarmen, which crucially made them miss the connection. From the window of our train while leaving Wuppertal-Oberbarmen, we could see the RE 13 which must have been transporting those unfortunate 5 or 6 people. I sometimes wonder how much sorrow and despair Deutsche Bahn can possibly bring about. Fortunately for me, those were not the ones who would complain about us not waiting for them to arrive. Well, not that complaining ever changes my behaviour, though, anyway.

Ronsdorf station is again one of those stations along S7, which would probably not have existed if they had known in their early days that Ronsdorf would look like this today. In fact, this line S7 itself would probably be put into question today if Remscheid had never existed. So for most of the people, Ronsdorf is probably just an annoying station which makes their travel from Wuppertal to Remscheid longer. So this morning other passengers must have been surprised to see a chunk of people leaving the train at Ronsdorf. Yes, it started like this this morning, and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it took only a few minutes to enter the nature at the beginning.

For some reason, this area around Ronsdorf is quite well maintained. From the beginning to the end, we were walking a well defined path, with no obstacle at all. Not only there was no obstacle, but also the paths were going along the isohypse (I know you don’t know what “isohypse” means; it’s the contour line of constant elevation), i.e. it was relatively flat all the time. This was maybe the reason that there were also quite a few bicycles on the way.

Occasionally we had to go along narrow concrete streets next to cars passing by. Well, I could have paid more attention to this aspect when I created the trail.

We had a break near the restaurant Der Grund, although we could have had a break everywhere today, since there were quite a few restaurants along the trail. We also found a grass field nearby, where we picnicked. In strong contrast to what the weather forecast was telling, it was quite sunny today and for hiking it was slightly too warm, but for picnic it was the right weather. It’s gonna allegedly start raining from tomorrow. What a luck.

We crossed this one dam we also saw last time we came to Ronsdorf. It was apparently quite a tourist attraction, even though there’s nothing quite special about it. Maybe because this is the moment you come out of the forest, so that the landscape changes drastically all of a sudden. Indeed, we stayed in the forest almost all the time today. But I personally liked it, maybe because we were always on a slope or maybe because the trees were not planted so densely. I don’t know why I like some forests and not others (for example I didn’t like the one in Marl-Sinsen, but maybe it’s an entirely different discussion).