Hiking from Dortmund to Witten

Again, we got a problem with the German railway, although this time maybe we shouldn’t be blaming them too much. There was a bridge that collapsed at Wuppertal. I was aware of this accident yesterday, but it was only when Nicola contacted me on this issue that I realised that the hike around Hagen that I had planned initially cannot be done.

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So it was a last minute decision that we went to Dortmund instead. This was a trail that I had for quite some time, but didn’t use because I was never sure if there were restaurants or something for a proper break. Anyway, I thought it was a good place for an emergency session, so this time I took it nevertheless.

Despite the last minute change, a lot of people still decided to join us. So just like every time, Zaman and I had to walk quite fast at the beginning to make sure that there wouldn’t be any huge cluster building up.

Well, even though this was an emergency plan, maybe I could have come up with a better path at the beginning. From the train station to the first forestal path was already quite some distance, but then we mostly had to see concrete roads. Zaman started to call it one of the worst hikes ever.

But I knew that that was not all about today’s hike. From some point asphalt was entirely gone. There was also quite a mixture of forests and fields along the way. Today’s trail was super winding path which could have been shortened everywhere. This was probably my effort to make it longer in the nature, but it’s good that no one had the idea of making it indeed shorter.

And as I was expecting, there was no place for a break. There was indeed a hotel on the way as I had seen, but it was closed. I don’t know if it was related to coronavirus or not. So we simply went slightly farther and had a break in a field. Since there was no toilet nearby, we made the break relatively short this time. Some people even started walking before we started.

The second half was much more fun than the first half. We were mainly walking through a forest, but then it was a beautiful area, not like in Bergisches Land or so. Well actually I already knew it beforehand, because we’ve already been to Witten several times and every time we had an amazing trail. It’s a pity that there aren’t many train stations in this area.

And in Witten there was a nice city center where we traditionally have ice cream (even though I had French fries this time).

In the end, even though the first part was horrifying, I guess in total it was a nice trail. Maybe I’m gonna change the first quarter or something and offer something similar in the near future.