Hiking from Altena to Werdohl

Due to the weekend trip and my business trip to Berlin and Prague, I was away for 3 weeks. I’m sure that people are really getting used to other organizers than me. This time it was organized by Rahul, so it was a massive 20 km hike.

Not so surprisingly, our train this morning got cancelled again. Well, I had a massive delay of 4 hours on the way from Prague, so instead of 8pm I arrived some time past midnight. Compared to this, it was like nothing.

So we were supposed to arrive some time past 11am, but instead we arrived past noon. Good job German railway. At least we could take this weird IC train from Dortmund. It is indeed an IC train, but only from Dillenburg. Until there, it is just an RE train so you can take it with a regional ticket, like Deutschlandticket.

We basically already did this trail some years ago, but this time we were walking in the opposite direction. Apparently Rahul didn’t really think about it, but frankly Altena is a much nicer place to finish, so I would have done it other way around. At least we could take a group photo right at the beginning.

The weather is now totally different from 4 weeks ago when I hiked last time. At that time it was so hot that I had to take my 2L water bag and it was still not enough. Today just a small bottle was enough. It feels like winter is coming directly without autumn. At least we got this beautiful blue sky with some clouds, kind of sky I really like.

There were mainly new people today, or at least those I didn’t know very well. And mostly girls – out of 8 or 9 people there were only 3 boys. This group has no particular tendency these days. So funny.

I got the feeling that some people were not so well prepared for today’s hike, especially for the first part. I was wrong – as we moved forward, people did a great job. Maybe the fact that there was no burning sun anymore helped a lot. It was also a really nice area, with a lot of trees surrounding us. As a matter of fact, I didn’t expect such a beautiful area in the Sauerland, where I find the forests generally quite ugly. Today’s forests were really massive, totally beating my expectations.

There were also beautiful fields along the way today. Some of them were nicely maintained. Sometimes there were some horses, sometimes it was just a field. There was also an airfield with small aircraft leaving every now and then.

As we started the hike fairly late, we decided to have a break only after the first 5km, right next to the airfield. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, as we could also see one plane leaving.

I already talked about massive forests around this area, but there were some places where it was so massive that there was hardly any light. Frankly I never expected a place like this in the Sauerland. It was definitely a nice experience though.

Just like always, Rahul kept going and going. So I didn’t see him often after the first hike. I stopped with a few people along the way a few times. I don’t know whether I was not so well prepared anymore after not hiking for 3 weeks, or I just got bored at some point, but it felt just overly long today. This being said, I could entertain myself with podcasts. It looks like the others nevertheless had a good time.

Towards the end, we looked up the trains, and it looked like it was ok to get a quick ice cream in the city of Werdohl since the train had a delay of a few minutes. I was wrong. As I approached the train station, I could see our train leave. It somehow managed to reduce the delay by one minute. That minute turned out to be deadly. Anyway, we took the same IC as this morning and went back home. It was past 8pm when we arrived in Düsseldorf. What a long day.