Hiking from Dahl to Hagen

You might have noticed there’s a certain number of trails which have been there for ever on my map, but never selected. That’s mostly because there’s no place for a break. Without is often rather difficult, or at least I get complaints every now and then. So usually I take a trail with a restaurant or a city in between. There’s this one trail going from Hagen-Dahl to Hagen main station, which I must have created a long long time ago, which has never been selected for this reason. But at the same time, it didn’t look particularly promising either. But if you are reading right after it was published, or if you are careful enough, you probably already know that this is the second hike after the lockdown measures were partially lifted. And since all the restaurants are closed right now, people must know that there’s no possibility of a break in civilisation. And since apparently everyone is still quite careful, I was sure that there wouldn’t be to many people joining today. So it was a great opportunity to give it a try.

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We were 8 today. And it looked very much like social distancing would not work out, as some people were clearly too close to others. In fact, I learned later that they live together, but I was so alarmed that I shared in the WhatsApp group that it depends entirely on them whether I can organise future sessions or not. If you know me well, you might already know that I hate to control other people’s behaviour. But I think it’s true that the organizer will have to take responsibility for this, even though it doesn’t make much sense in my opinion, since whether people follow rules or not is up to their own ethics and sense of responsibility and not something the organizer should impose on them.

Anyway, we started hiking in Dahl, an isolated place no one seems to visit. Whenever we go there, we are the largest group. Today, probably as well, even though we were only 8.

I guess it was good that we didn’t do today’s trail in a large group. The paths were often very narrow and we would probably not have been able to keep a sufficient distance if we wanted to go next to each other with more than 2 people. One problem I had in this regard today was that every now and then, the person in front of me gets too close to me while talking, so that I stop walking to get a sufficient distance, but then the other person stops walking because I’m too far away. This happened several times and in the end we walked quite slowly. Maybe I should make this point clearer next time.

Despite my low expectations today, today’s trail was actually pretty okay. I don’t claim this was a particularly good one, but compared to other trails in Hagen, you can enjoy walking with little effort. But maybe this is also related to the fact that a lot of trails in Hagen are rather disappointing even though it’s often extremely complicated.

We just simply sat in the middle of nowhere for the break. There was anyway no other possibility there. The social distancing is … well, more or less. I was anyway in my camping chair elsewhere.

Today’s hike was still Hagen – there were places where we weren’t sure whether the paths really existed or not. You need a little bit of creativity. But as I stated above, it was relatively easy anyway.

Some parts of today’s trail was also asphalted. It’s rather rare to see around Hagen.

If I can be very honest about today’s hike, I was a little bit disappointed by the fact that the social distancing was not respected all the time. Maybe we need some practice to get used to it. So let’s see what it’s gonna be like next week.