Hiking from Eitorf to Merten

While in VRR we have visited a lot of places homogeneously, there are a few places in VRS that are over-represented in this group. Today’s route from Eitorf to Merten is probably a relatively good example. Even though today’s track was hardly overlapping with any of the tracks we did before, there was hardly anything new in today’s track. Of course, that obviously doesn’t mean it was bad, though.

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In the previous evening there was a discussion on whether to get an NRW group ticket. We decided to get one with four people. Then two of them cancelled in the morning. In the end, Soumil and I were travelling on a 5-person ticket. That’s kind of an expensive travel.

So this morning there was practically no one at Düsseldorf central. Maybe people are recovering from yesterday’s binge drinking (because of Japan day). Some people joined from Cologne Central, but the group stayed still relatively small.

This railway line, connecting Cologne and Siegen, goes along this river Sieg. So wherever we hike there, we can be right next to this river, and when the track is well planned, in principle we can have a break at the river (no guarantee that there’s a nice beach though), and usually they have clean clear water.

For some reason, today we were walking on the concrete for a very long time at the beginning. While walking up the first slope, I was wondering how I could possibly take such a path.

Then we had a very large forest area. It was nice to be in a shadowy area after a long slope. I mean, it was not such a hot day today, but still the slope heated up the body fairly quickly.

There was one place where it was not very clear where we were supposed to go, because there was this Siegsteig tag that was placed in a misleading way, but otherwise we could follow the path quite easily. I mean, that’s partly the reason why we come back to this area so often as well.

We had a break, as I announced above, next to the Sieg. Unfortunately the access to the water was not quite as easy as I had imagined. We simply stayed in the shadow below the bridge. I guess if it had been much warmer we might have wanted to enter the water as well. In that moment, the fever that we had at the beginning was already sort of gone.

Deforestation – you might have been fed up with me talking about it over and over again, but I still strongly feel really bad whenever I see this.

We reached the train station exactly when the train arrived. There was anyway no ice cream and nothing there, so in the end it was such a perfect timing. We got an ice cream afterwards in Cologne. How perfect is that.