Hiking from Frimmersdorf to Grevenbroich!

Both in Cologne and Düsseldorf, there’s a huge difference between the two sides of the Rhine. In both cities, the same side is rich and the other is poor, although the rich side of Cologne is a little bit like the poor side of Düsseldorf. Well, this is one thing, but more importantly for us, one side is where it gets hillier, and the other side is where it gets flatter. Quite obviously, we don’t go to the flat side very often. Today, we did, for the first time in months. And actually I was fairly looking forward to this one.

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The reason why I was looking forward to this one is actually very simple: I have never gone beyond Grevenbroich. Well maybe I should elaborate on this a bit: you can maybe already recognise a weird hill on today’s trail, and a hole to the west. This hole is actually where they dug coal in the past, and the hill is the soil they had to get rid of. So the soil is usually poor, which actually makes a quite particular impression. This is something we saw when we hiked in Recklinghausen, but it’s been already 2 years since then. Why not see this heap again, in a different place.

Here’s the monument of the day: coal-fired (?) power station. We were wandering around this thing all day long. It looks gloomy. Well, it’s a gloomy establishment anyway.

Speaking of gloom, it was like winter again today. The arrival of March hasn’t brought a lot so far, even though March is usually considered as the beginning of spring. Well, we wait maybe a few days more and see what it’s gonna then look like.

The hill that I talked about above turned out to be actually a huge one. From below, it looked almost like a mountain. It’s impressive that the civilisation was able to create something like that. At least it was much larger than the one we saw in Recklinghausen.

Top of this heap was much greener than I had expected. Probably they did quite some work to make it green. It’s actually almost a pity that they did not create a proper recreational area in the end. It was more like a huge field. As you can see on the map above, we were essentially going around this huge field.

After this huge circle, we had a break on the slope, exactly when it started raining. Fortunately, we could first sit down, so that with an umbrella it stayed more or less dry. But in this cold weather we didn’t really want to stay there for a long time. With a break of merely 20 min, we started moving again. I could see the exhaustion on the face of some people. It was rather clear that a distance of more than 16 km was probably a bit too much for this season.

At least we finished in a super nice Turkish restaurant afterwards, by taking a train from Grevenbroich back to Neuss. Neuss is actually a very nice city. It’s a pity that we don’t go there very often.