Hiking from Abenden to Rur

In the last couple of weeks, I tried to organise a hike around a lake or a river, in the hope that we’d be able to enjoy the water when it gets really hot. It never got really hot. With this in mind, I decided not to organise one with swimming. What a great surprise that it got super hot this weekend.

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It’s a great fact that there’s no clear rule about anything in this group. This on the one hand means everyone is free to do whatever they like, but on the other hand it means I also do things according to my preferences. So I scrapped the original plan of going to Aachen (which was postponed by 3 weeks) and put an event for Rurberg, where we hiked only 3 weeks ago. Well, it was a nice place. Why not?

There was little confusion about the organisation in the end. Some people were still thinking that it was Aachen, but most of the people obviously paid attention and knew where we were going. Very good.

This one train that goes from Düren to Heimbach goes through train stations, which hardly look like train stations. We started from Abenden, where I got the impression that the train stopped for technical failure or something. But for sure, it was a great place for hiking.

Just like three weeks ago, there was a never-ending slope at the beginning. It was a very light slope, but going like forever. Well, at the same time, the trail wasn’t quite as monotonous as last time so I guess most of the people didn’t mind the slope.

Even though the temperature was quite high from early morning, actually the weather was not particularly good at the beginning (it was even raining when we were in Cologne). So it was actually extremely humid at the beginning and hot. Worst combination you could possibly think of when you climb up a slope.

The weather got better and better as we walked up the slope and when we arrived the highest point, we had a clear blue sky. There were hardly trees nearby there and we were essentially being burnt by the sun.

But then this didn’t last too long – we reached the famous view point over the lake. Today the view was even better than last time because of the weather.

I then directly went down and started swimming in the lake. My shirt was already full of sweat. I could nearly hear a sizzling sound of water cooling down my body when I entered the water.

This time, as I half announced it on the Meetup page, most of the people brought swimming stuff. There were some other people on the spot, but for the amount of space available, it was absolutely a small number, so surprisingly we didn’t have to chase anyone away this time :). I have to say it’s almost a wonder that such a perfect place is so empty.

We had a super long break there today. For the ones who swam, it was almost like a real vacation elsewhere. I’m wondering how the others saw it.

The real adventure started right after the break. We first followed a regular path around the lake. Then there was a path, which clearly didn’t look like a path. This one part is marked black in the map above and it was indeed not considered as a hiking path, but still the way somehow existed and we all went up there. It was a huge scramble right after the break 🙂 I actually went up and down once again, to make sure that everyone found the path (and indeed some of them missed it). I usually don’t do it, but this time I did it because there was plenty of time to the next train.

At least the rest of the trail was really easy. It was first flat and went down slowly, leading us back to the original train station. Every now and then we could see nearby mountain ranges, but it was rather rare in the forest.

I thought we had plenty of time, but the first group that arrived at the train station managed to take a train one hour earlier. Apparently they ran towards the end (why did they do that?). We arrived around 15 min before the train that I had decided to take when we started walking. There were a couple of nice cafés nearby but for that we didn’t have enough time. At least I could enter the river – the water was freezing cold this time :).