Hiking report

Hiking from Engelskirchen to Ründeroth

Things started to turn bad again.

For the last few months, it looked very much like the number of infections was going up only slowly – a rather good sign because we were all alerted all the time, but had enough time to react. And then this week came. There was nothing better than during the first wave, only it looked like it’s actually getting much worse (which is already real in other countries).

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So, while we were planning to have a weekend trip to Cochem this weekend, we scrapped the plan fairly quickly. As soon as I did so, I created this event, in the hope that it wouldn’t be impossible for us to go ahead with this plan.

The question of canceling the event was therefore also just as real. Indeed, I essentially cancelled all the other events. But still I stick to the belief that hiking is safe, and as long as something is safe, then we should carry on a sustainable life. It might sound like a self-justification. I’m ready to get criticism, but probably I’ll keep doing that.

Even though VRS offers a lot of possibilities, somehow I’m offering similar trails. This one kind of continues the one around Engelskirchen. We all loved that track at that time, but this time, just looking at the satellite photo, it didn’t look like a particularly interesting one.

I’m starting to get used to leaving the group as soon as we arrive at the train station. But the problem is people are apparently also getting used to going fast at the beginning, so that my strategy of pulling the group apart didn’t work at the beginning. I needed maybe half an hour to make sure that there was no large cluster anymore.

Just like everywhere, this railway line lies in a valley (along the river Agger). This means there was a steep slope at the beginning. For the rest of the day, we were in a forest almost all the time, even though we could see that just like everywhere in this area the trees are suffering. By the way it was only yesterday that they published an article on Tagesschau talking about the forests dying around Germany. Apparently it’s not just a local problem here.

When we were going up the hill, I didn’t really notice, but it was actually very cold today. I became aware of this when we wanted to have a break. There was a restaurant there, but it was closed because of Corona, and we essentially had to stay outside during the entire break. Maybe it was only half an hour or so that we could comfortably sit in a meadow, but then it was simply too cold to us. In the future hikes I really have to see if we can constantly find a place to stay. It’s really not clear what this winter is going to look like with regard to the corona situation.

There were some field after the break (we could have had a break there). Then there was some wilderness. Well, compared to areas like Sauerland it was still easy today. It could have been a wonderful place only if the weather had been better.

I knew that Ründeroth was not very small, but there was one ice cream parlour, which is open only in summer. Summer means … until today. We were really lucky in that moment, because the train had just left and we had to wait nearly one hour, which would have been horrible at this rather dull train station.

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