Hiking from Eitorf to Dattenfeld

It was around two or three weeks ago that the things were drastically eased in Germany. At that time, it was not really clear what it could look like in a few weeks – some people predicted a next wave, others were more relaxed. From my view, it looked more like people simply wished to see what they wished to see, without having to think about it too much. Well, after all it also looked to me like it was crazy and irrational enough, that all rational people stopped thinking.

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Fortunately things didn’t get worse. With the number of infections drastically going down everyday, we were slowly becoming more and more confident, and now I can finally organise normal hikes with no restrictions anymore, which looked so far only a few weeks ago.

With the upcoming weekend trip (next week) in mind, I wanted to have done a few challenging trails over the weekend. It started with the one that I proposed this weekend, from Eitorf to Dattenfeld. This one was close to 20 km. I gave a short warning in the WhatsApp group, but apparently people were not badly affected by my message, as there were still something like 20 people, compared to 13 people who had signed up according to Facebook.

What we did today must have followed Siegsteig. We’ve done a few of them over the last year. Most notably one of the first hikes after the first lockdown in summer 2020 was along the Siegsteig. It’s a quite impressive area which is easily accessible by train from Cologne. But most notably it goes along this beautiful river Sieg, which we unfortunately hardly saw today.

There was a super quick transition from the train station to the hiking trail at the beginning. While this made me insecure, the trail became comfortable quite quickly. Then we had to go along an asphalted street for some time, but except for this part we were mostly walking in the nature.

In contrast to what I had initially expected, there were a lot of fields today. Luckily, I was there in long trousers, but I heard from other people that they could find a lot of ticks.

Also, while the temperature rose significantly from a few weeks ago, the sun was partially covered the entire day. With not so many trees to protect us, it was really the right day to be there today.

We had a break in front of a restaurant today. I changed the trail only in order to have a possibility to go to that restaurant, but in the end apparently no one went there. We stayed in a large field for around 1h.

Maybe because I had a really good conversation today, but I had the feeling that it didn’t feel like close to 20 km today. Miriam, who’s joining us next week, told me the same thing. I could see that some people from last year are not quite as fit anymore, but I hope that we’re still going to have a great weekend next week.

Well, unfortunately there was no ice cream at the station. What a disappointment.