Hiking around Velbert and street food and music festival!

One of the events that make me feel that summer is here is the street food and music festival. People often mistake it with street food festival, but as the name suggests there is basically no music in the street food festival. The music part is usually not particularly good (I mean, live music in Germany…), but it still gives a nice atmosphere, so I like to go there very often.

As I have already reported a few times, there are a lot more people joining over Meetup these days. The group grew and grew over the course of the week, and we reached something like 60 people in the Telegram group. And as a matter of fact, there were apparently even more people than that. I think part of the reason why there were so many people was obviously the street food and music festival, but another reason is because it was right in the middle of a lot of cities: This place, Velbert, is at a nice position from Düsseldorf, Cologne and the Ruhr area, meaning it can attract indeed a very large number of people. I remember also from the pre-covid times that whenever the hike was around this area, there were a lot of people joining.

When our train reached Wuppertal, there were already a lot of people. I’m glad that many people came from the other direction to Velbert Nierenhof, which was our starting point. As the train station is not particularly large, we simply start walking as soon as we arrived.

It’s been some time since we came to this area last time. To be honest, it’s not a particularly beautiful area, with a lot of farmland and flat landscape, **except** for the area around the S9 line, which includes Nierenhof. Indeed as the hike started, some people told me they didn’t expect such a great trail around here. It was also partly not easy to pass. What an adventure.

But obviously the things started looking very different very quickly. We were very often walking through fields and roads etc. As the temperature skyrocketed these days, it was not so easy to stay without trees around us.

Rahul and I were super busy inviting people to the beach volleyball which started taking place every Friday. There were quite some people interested it. Maybe you too?

We had a break even before we reached one half. Apparently some people simply stopped, so this place became the one for the official break. There were so many people at once that I was happy that I didn’t organize today’s hike (it was Rahul). You can see most of the people on the group photo, but this large group is not even everyone.

Velbert does not have a train station, so we don’t end here very often. This time, because of the street food and music festival we came here, and I was actually happy to stay there, because there’s this beautiful open zoo, and a nice city center.

The city center was obviously quite full. We got anyway an ice cream, and looked for a place to sit in the festival. Compared to places like Düsseldorf, it still does not get too crowded, so we could very much enjoy it. The food was obviously overpriced, but we still liked it very much.

There was a bit of a problem with the bus connection, because many of them were for Wuppertal and it would have taken over an hour. In the end we took the one for Mettmann and took an S28 to go back home.