Hiking report

Hiking from Bosheim to Kaldenkirchen!

Hot.

It’s not like I don’t like good weather. Especially if I think of what it was like last winter, we can be more than happy that it’s not raining. But still we might have wanted to see some drops this week.

Fortunately the extreme weather somewhat finished on Friday and today, even though there was no rain at all, it was cloudy. Not a surprise that a lot more people joined today, especially new people.

This is the train that we took when we went to Venlo a few months ago, or rather, that we did not take, because at that time after changing the platforms a few times, the train arrived in a different platform than the one they had announced. This time the train fortunately came, with an initially 5 min delay. On the way right before Mönchengladbach, they got a “signal disruption” (Signalstörung). When you take a train in Germany, very often it just stops in the middle of nowhere. And the reason is mostly “signal disruption”. I always wonder if it is so difficult to make functioning signals.

After some time they announced in the train that since the signal problem could not be quickly solved on the spot, they’d go slowly. For me, there is no logics in “signals have a problem so we go slowly”, but at least we could continue our journey without having a 45 min delay.

This hiking trail was a part of what was given on this page. Out of the original plan, I created three trails and today’s one was the middle one. I was not really sure if we’d ever do this hike when I made it, since this part of Germany is only extremely flat and it’s also a little bit weird to stop right before the Dutch border. However, I saw there were quite some lakes there. So just like last week, we could maybe swim there … ? With this in mind, I took my swimming stuff, without being sure if it’s really possible to swim.

Boisheim (our starting point) was a small city and we could almost directly start walking in the nature there. Very quickly we reached the river Nette, which we followed more or less the entire day. The dry days had a clear damage to the water quality; we could smell the effect every now and then.

We arrived at Ferkensbruch, the only one lake which looked like it might be possible to swim (and had a restaurant nearby). Unfortunately, the water was too dirty there, more like a toilet for ducks. At least we found a nice grass field where we could picnic. I feel a bit sorry for Mahsa who brought her swimming stuff just for today.

And I must say today’s hiking trail was not particularly beautiful, but luckily we had mostly newcomers and they were anyway enjoying their first hiking experience. Hopefully they’ll come back for the future sessions.

At Kaldenkirchen, we got icecreams and went back home by train, the one that’s always full in the afternoon (because of the Germans who go to Venlo for shopping on Sunday, where in Germany everything is closed, whereas it’s a rather normal day in the Netherlands).

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

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