Hiking at Lennep

True, I complained a lot last year. It was raining all the time. Now, it’s been more than 10 days that it’s sunny. It’s not like we mind sunny weather, but we wouldn’t mind if it starts raining. Anyway, today was one of those sunny days that I would have dreamed of if it was arriving last winter, with around 30 °C.

This morning, we were to see each other at 10:45 in front of the main station, which is just 5 min away from my apartment, to take the train which was leaving at 11:12. I somehow managed to arrive extremely late, so that there was only 10 min or so remaining before the train departure. Everyone had already left the place and went to the platform. So good that no confusion arose for not having me there. In fact it’s been something like training for the participants, who rarely see their organiser arriving in time.

When I arrived at the station, an unexpected problem emerged: we didn’t have enough tickets. Indeed, usually we have enough people who have a monthly card (which allows to take another person for free on weekends) and students (who automatically have this monthly card). However, we are now in the middle of the exam period. And there were way less students than usual today. When we arrived at Düsseldorf Hbf, we were 5 tickets short. Usually it’s other way around. And especially we were going to Lennep today, which was in the zone C, i.e. we would pay more than 10 € per person for one way (and so something like 25 € for two ways). And badly enough, I didn’t even know how to buy a ticket anymore. While I was panicking, more people arrived, and fortunately those were the ones who had a monthly ticket. In the end, there was still one ticket missing. The great thing is, there was someone on the train who was listening to our discussion who told us that she could take another person on her ticket. And so we did not have to buy an extra ticket (NB: to be precise, we were still continuing discussing on the train, which was already unlawful). Unfortunately, this person was on the train up to Wuppertal-Oberbarmen, where we changed trains. Some people joined there, but still there was one ticket missing. I was about to buy another ticket, when the train came and we had to enter it. In this moment, I found Mahs (who is a student) on the train, who saved all of us.

It’s been quite some time since I created the hiking trail at Lennep, which I thought would be a perfect one to swim in the lake at the same time. I waited for quite some time to put this one, because whenever I put a trail with a possibility of swimming, it was cold. This time, the weather forecast was saying two weeks ago that we’d have an excellent week. Even though usually I don’t trust anything weather forecast says about tomorrow, but somehow I decided to trust what it was saying about two weeks later.

It took some time to cross Lennep. There was one Canadian traveller, Tom, who started wondering whether what we call “hike” was just going through the city (which is actually possible if Germans use the word “Wandern”).

The lake, Wuppertalsperre, has a proper swimming area which is free to enter. Usually in Germany, it’s whether extremely dirty and forbidden to enter the water or it’s commercial. This was probably the first time that I saw a reasonable place to swim. The problem was, we didn’t have a lot of students this time. So the dynamics was completely different. There were me and a few more people who went into water, but most of the people simply stayed on the field. It was really a pity since we could enjoy clean water this time.

Unfortunately the rest of the trail wasn’t particularly beautiful. The highlight of the day was clearly the lake. Pity that not many people wanted to go to the water.

The trail can be downloaded from this link (kml-format) or this link (gpx-format)