Hiking around Schloss Burg

Some weeks ago, someone from the telegram channel complained that the recent hikes are too far away and too long. That was mainly because they were not organized by me. This time, I finally organized a hike, I don’t know how many months since the last one, but here I am again. I’m sure that there are people unhappy with my easy going hikes as well, but I think it’s good to have different kinds of hikes every now and then.

As it was fairly close to Düsseldorf today, the number of people signing up also skyrocketed. Unfortunately, the weather forecast started going downwards at some point, so that the number also decreased towards the end of the week, but still it was a significant number.

Apparently the S1 does not run between Düsseldorf and Solingen for some time during the summer. So we had to go to Wuppertal Oberbarmen and take the S7 from the opposite direction. Not so surprisingly, the toilet was broken on S7, which made it difficult for some people because there’s only this one restaurant at Solingen Schaberg which is not open in the morning.

There is this slide at the beginning at Schaberg, that everyone somehow loves. It made a long queue.

I think Solingen is the nearest somewhat hilly area with a reasonable amount of nature. Compared to last week’s heatwave, it was a comfortable day, but even if with heatwave, I think it would have been a nice hike here with all the trees covering most of the track.

Since distance from Schaberg to Schloss Burg is not so long, usually we make it longer by going to different places along the way. One possibility is to this one lake in the south, which you can visit by crossing the Wupper, which now has a convenient bridge. It was not there for some time a few years ago. The reconstructed one already looks old, but I’m happy that the made it again.

That’s because this water body is a dam and it’s pretty impressive. People stopped there for some time to take photos etc.

People also had a break some time after the dam, before reaching Schloss Burg. I guess it was just too long before the break today.

Anyway I went all the way to Schloss Burg, my favourite place around this area. Unfortunately, the premise was largely under refurbishment, so that we could not freely move around. But the area with shops was mostly open. We sat in the usual area with the cable car. We had a nap and some people even visited the castle, so the break was extremely long today.

We then went down to the Wupper and walked back towards the Müngsten bridge, which is by the way the highest railway bridge in Germany (which I must have written so many times).

The river was extremely low today, which was not surprising given the very small amount of rain these days. Still I plunged (?) into the water. The water looked a lot cleaner than the Sieg last week. And fortunately the sun came out, so it felt very warm in this moment.

Half an hour later or so we went back to Schaberg, going through the usual athletic path. Then back to Düsseldorf. As we got a participant from Taiwan, we went to the Taiwanese restaurant in Düsseldorf (Ilha Formosa). There was no ice cream, but still a nice end of the day!