Hiking from Bochum to Castrop and Kirmes!

It took several days to fully recover from my birthday party last week. Maybe partly because of the age, but maybe also because it went on for a couple of days afterwards, as Eduard, an old friend of mine from Göttingen, stayed at my place for a few days and there were always people coming to my apartment. Whatever the reason was, there’s so much going on everyday here. Summer is coming, there’ll be even more going on.

In this sense, today was like the beginning of the season, because I specifically chose this hike from Bochum to Castrop in order to go to the Kirmes of Castrop, which is a moving amusement park. And it was the first time for me to go to Castrop anyway, which I would probably not visit otherwise since it’s in the Ruhr region far away from the Ruhr river.

Bochum, Zeche Constantin, which was a subway stop and our starting point. It doesn’t look bad, but noisy. It took us something like half an hour until we were truly walking inside the nature. I don’t really understand why no one starts complaining. But those who knew Castrop must have been surprised that after crossing the highway, it was extremely green everywhere. It looked like we were truly walking in a forest.

Since we were still inside the Ruhr region, it was extremely easy to find a place to have a break. This time we had a very large park, with an … Ice cream stand! Just as it was nice to have a nap outside. Some people were playing Frisbee. I was eating an ice cream 🙂

Today it was fully guided by Cláudia. These days, I have pretty much nothing to do anymore whenever we go hiking. I just post the event on CS. Then there’ll be someone who can take me to the hiking location for free, and there’s also a guide. I just have to say whenever I want to have break. Such a great event. I don’t understand why people don’t want to do that.

I must say I was surprised to see so many trees in the second half of the trail, especially looking at it from the map. And it was not entirely flat either. It was almost not so wrong to call it a hike in the end

For the entire day, I was not really sure if the place I chose for the ending was the right place for the Kirmes. It was. Even though the aspect of amusement park was not that important, we still enjoyed the atmosphere.

Next week is our weekend hike to Blankenheim. Let’s see what it’s gonna be like 🙂