Hiking from Braubach to Koblenz

There’s this super annoying thing called Deutsche Bahn. This time it got us really hard again.

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This time we anyway had a fairly tight schedule with 10 min time to change trains at Koblenz to go to Braubach. With no good alternative at hand, I could only hope that the things would go well. When the train arrived in Düsseldorf, it already had a delay of 5 min. Already pretty tight. Over the course of the journey to Cologne, it started accumulating a few min of delay. Both DB and we were very hopeful that things would go well in the end. We were wrong: Right before Brühl, there were allegedly other trains that got priority over us to cross a crossing, which gave us 10 min delay. And then there was this magical thing called Weichenstörung, which left us with a wonderful delay of 30 min. So in this moment, we had accumulated something like 45 min of delay, which basically made it impossible to make it to the connecting train in Koblenz. Then on top of all this, DB decided to cancel the last 3 stops, meaning the train was not going to Koblenz anymore. This is a strategy that DB takes every now and then, because cancellation does not go into their official statistics, only delays, meaning it doesn’t hurt them to cancel trains at any rate. At this point, not only it was impossible to get the connecting train, but also the one coming 1h later was in danger, as all alternative trains had delays. There was a heated discussion in the Telegram group on whether or not to change the hike. Fortunately, the next train did not accumulate too much delay, so that we could still make it to the connecting train at Koblenz, and therefore we could do the original hike with a total delay of 1h.

The whole thing got me somewhat out of rhythm, as we started hiking past noon. We were a relatively large group of maybe around 20 people? That’s of course not extremely large compared to the group size before corona, but these days the group tends to be relatively small, so it’s still a significant number. I think part of the reason why there were more people was because the Cologne group started collecting donations and those who didn’t agree with the policy came over. Even one of the organizers from the other group joined us this time.

Just like everywhere along the Rhine (south of Bonn), it was directly quite steep. It’s so weird to experience such an area as it feels like we just left the train station, but then you are already in the mountains. Especially when you reach the hilltop, you see how high you came within such a short period of time.

There was this beautiful castle on top of the hill. I kind of regretted to not go there, but the others who have been there told me that it’s not really worth going there because you have to pay to enter the building, even though it’s not quite as interesting.

We were mostly following the Rheinsteig today, which we have done a few times before. The great thing about the Rheinsteig is that you can expect a lot of viewpoints quite regularly. That was also very much the case today.

As the train arrived very late, by the time we started I had already finished all my water. There was, however, a cool box along the way, where people were basically selling drinks. There was simply a jar and a piece of paper stating the prices, nothing else. The drinks inside were obviously quite cold. I wonder whether such a system really works.

There were some people joining the hike for the first time, but mostly those who had been there already before. For most of the people the track seemed to be ok, but some seemed to struggle a lot. Well it’s true that it’s maybe the first “summer” hike, i.e. a hike where we explore as much as we can. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also true that it’s quite challenging.

I was hoping that along the Lahn we would have a possibility to have a break. That was unfortunately not the case. But right after the Lahn, as we went up the hill, there was a small hut where we could have a break. It was unfortunately too small for the number of people we had today.

There was a little bit of up and down after the break, but it wasn’t so wild anymore. Just like in the first part, there was a great mixture of forests, fields, great view over the Rhine and the sun. It was such a fulfilling day.

But I was really annoyed when we arrived in Koblenz, as it was already 5:30pm and was for me already too late for the beer festival. If it had been one hour earlier, it would have been perfect. Anyway, as Bogdan was fascinated by this one ice cream shop, we all went there, and got back home afterwards, without visiting the beer festival. What a pity.