Hiking from Dortmund to Herne
After having left Couchsurfing two weeks ago, this one was the very first one that I organized on Meetup. Well, it didn’t make a huge difference, but maybe because it’s still the beginning, maybe because it was said to be a storm today. Let’s see how it’s gonna evolve in the future.
It’s only in winter that we come to the heart of the Ruhr area. And today’s trail went through an area that I could hardly imagine for a hike. But then again, in winter I guess it’s pretty okay to be able to have a walk in the first place. Why not.
And so, not quite surprisingly, we had to go through a residential area for quite some time after we left Dortmund Mengede. I hope the ones who came for the first time with Meetup were not too shocked to see that it was not quite a hike normal people would normally call a hike.
But then the landscape wasn’t so bad after that. It was indeed still very close to the civilisation, but certainly better than what you would imagine for Dortmund. Well, I mean it’s Dortmund. What kind of expectations can you possibly have. There were also random animals on the way, as you can see on the photo.
But then actually every now and then it wasn’t perfectly easy either, as the photo above shows. My trousers got dirty. Thanks Dortmund.
Actually today, there’d be a storm according to the weather forecast, which turned out to be fairly wrong. But I still trusted them and did not take anything for lunch. There were a few restaurants at Castrop, and especially, right at the entry to the city there were two restaurants which looked pretty much the same, although one was Italian and the other was Spanish. I’m pretty sure that there’d be some competition between them. But probably thanks to this competition, the Spanish one we took was actually pretty good.
This is the railway that took us back home (or rather: first to Herne, then to Düsseldorf with a different line). It is lamentable that the German railway has been removing existing lines, but then again every now and then I wonder how this ridiculous one line railway can actually survive, although we certainly appreciated it today since without this it would have been quite complicated to go back home.
Please stop bashing Dortmund, its better than you think! You people from Düsseldorf… You know… 😉