Hiking from Essen to Velbert and Street Food and Music Festival!

There’s this city called Velbert, which is certainly not the biggest city in the Ruhr area, but one middle sized city. This city doesn’t have a train station, so that it makes it quite difficult for a group of up to 70 people to visit it. Today, we nevertheless decided to go there, mainly because of the street food and music festival taking place this weekend.

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There are two possibilities to go from Düsseldorf to Essen-Kupferdreh, where we started today: over Duisburg-Essen or over Wuppertal. Today, in order to avoid a conflict with people coming from Essen, I decided to take a connection going over Essen, even though this took longer than going over Wuppertal. For this reason or other, there was no one coming from Wuppertal today. Sorry for discriminating you guys (I didn’t mean it personally)…

Since the beginning of summer, we usually had hikes with more than 15 km, which I found was pretty okay. But maybe my feeling isn’t always shared with everyone, since I’ve been doing it now for more than two years and I already got used to walk a long distance. Today, we did a hike with less than 13 km, which felt like instantaneous. It’s amazing to see how much difference winter and summer actually make in terms of distance we can go.

Today, we were going part of Neanderlandsteig, that we used to visit when we started hiking two years ago. Since most of the landscapes along this hiking path were particularly good, we consumed most of them at the beginning. There were the ones remaining which mainly we could not reach by train. And not surprisingly, it was rather comfortable walking along this path today.

I was planning to have a break at a restaurant on the way. And again, I forgot to call them beforehand. And again, it was closed… We simply picnicked in a nearby field. Quite obviously fresh manure had been distributed on this field. I presume that most of the people have got used to this kind of situation over the course of so many hikes.

Velbert has slightly distinctive landscapes with a lot of fields surrounding this area. In winter it looks horribly empty, but right now it offers a great view in every direction. Pity that the weather was not particularly good today.