Hiking around Solingen Grünewald

Last week after I organised a hike, I asked the other people if they were interested to organize a hike. Hilal said yes. Somehow this group is more and more decentralised these days, which I like a lot.

Anyway, somehow he put a hike close to where we were two weeks ago, which is an area I like, but I might have also wanted to go somewhere else.

This morning, there was a small problem: Those who are familiar with the train system in this area might know that there’s this S1 that goes to Solingen Hbf, where there’s this S7 waiting for the S1. Then the S7 leaves 5 min after the S1 arrives. Since the connection is planned this way, it doesn’t really matter when the S1 arrives, it always works. This connection used to be shown when I arrived in Düsseldorf, then it stopped appearing, forcing us to take the S7 leaving 30 min later, and then it worked again for some time. This time, however, apparently Hilal did not see this connection, meaning according to his connection we were going to take the one 30 min later. As we realized that there was a train waiting for us in front of us, he actually decided to take it, meaning we arrived 30 min earlier than what he had initially written. That’s something I didn’t do when we came here the last time. In particular, I waited for the people who came from elsewhere, while allowing the ones travelling with me to start earlier (you can read it here)

The track he chose today was apparently called Liewerfrauenweg, because there were women carrying a water jar on their head. I don’t really know how it is related to hiking, but on the way we could see some monuments related to this, like this photo.

Today, there were clearly less people than two weeks ago. It was a little bit like when I was organizing the hikes before Crete. So the old normality came back, I’d say.

Due to the weather these days, the ground was super unstable. Every now and then we had to be very careful to not slip. This being said, I slipped once. I wasn’t injured but it hurt me still somewhat. Be careful.

There were some streams today along the way. Depending on where you come from it’s maybe not true, but I find the water here very clean, which is something rather rare here in Germany.

It was a nice mixture of forests and fields today. It’s a beautiful thing about Solingen. It’s also an area where there are some hills, but it’s never very hilly.

There was no location planned for break today. We simply found a bench and sat there. As it is now getting somewhat warm, it was nice to sit there and have a short nap. Since the ones who arrived according to Hilal’s original plan also arrived in this moment and we wanted to wait, I had extra time to sleep.