Hiking from Grafenberg to Ratingen

We made history today; I changed the trail entirely, in the last minute, leaving all the people who went to the original meeting point behind.

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Here’s what happened: today, we were supposed to go to Kaldenkirchen, from where we’d have hiked to Venlo, a city in the Netherlands. Today, however, there was a storm coming to this area. And just as always, as soon as there was some wind, the German railway stopped working nearly altogether. First there was no train connection anymore between Duisburg and Düsseldorf, which was properly announced. Then our train simply disappeared from the schedule. No idea what happened to it. Anyway, we had no idea whether it was ever possible to go to Kaldenkirchen.

Since there was hardly anyone coming from a different place than Düsseldorf, we decided to hike in Düsseldorf. There was indeed one girl coming from Duisburg, but we couldn’t trust the German railway. I’m really sorry.

For this, I spontaneously took a trail from Grafenberg to Ratingen, which we did around 2 years ago. And with this, we also made history: it was the very first hike we did for the second time.

It’s the carnival weekend. The traffic within Düsseldorf was very much disturbed. The tram we took did not reach the station that we wanted to reach. We had to walk some time to the starting point, in the rain and strong wind. Not bad that I was not the only one person walking there.

For this wind, it was probably a good idea that we took today’s trail. Not only because it was inside Düsseldorf, but also because the trees shielded us from the wind. This Grafenbergerwald is indeed inside Düsseldorf, but it’s the only one area where you don’t have to deal with the somewhat disordered landscape of Düsseldorf. You can fully enjoy the nature here. Besides, it’s not completely flat there either. Even though I wouldn’t dare call it a mountain, you still have to climb up a significant hill.

We went down the hill once and had a break there, essentially inside Düsseldorf again. Even though we were fully aware of the fact that it’s not quite allowed to use the installation of the Rheinbahn (local public transportation service), we simply stood under the roof at the nearby tram stop and had lunch. We could clearly see the puzzled glance of the people passing by.

We didn’t have to get wet entirely during the break, but the combination of wind and rain made it really difficult to hold an umbrella all the time today. After having opened and closed my umbrella several times, I realised that it didn’t really make a difference to use it anymore.

In Ratingen, we didn’t even go for coffee or anything. We simply took the first tram and went back to Düsseldorf.