Hiking from Hagen-Westbauer to Gevelsberg!

According to the weather forecast, it should have been sunny the whole day today. An extremely sunny weather. Appropriately enough, Clara hadn’t signed up for the event. The weird thing is, she said she would join us yesterday. And today, the weather changed drastically. And it was raining. I don’t understand how mighty she is.

This was particularly the case, when we drove at Hagen-Westbauer, which was the starting point of today’s hike, because exactly in that moment, namely when Clara arrived by train, it started raining hard. By the way, Clara is the person on the photo.

Just like in many countries in the northern hemisphere, the beginning and the end of October are simply not the same. Warm days are now definitely gone. We’re heading for winter. November is the first month of snow for me, even if this changed a little bit over the years. Anyway, the hikes are not the same anymore, although I wouldn’t say it’s bad, because we can enjoy it in a different way.

This area around Hagen has somehow been spared so far, even though there are so many hiking paths I could create recently. Whenever we changed trains at Hagen, I looked at the beautiful mountains from the station and thought it must be a great place to hike. Today was the first session that I could finally organize, an important one, because due to lack of information in the Internet, I must rely on the feeling I get by looking at the satellite pictures and open street maps, which usually is not enough to fully understand how successful it would be. So if we experience a very bad hike, I might scrap the other hikes altogether.

Here, I have to talk about something that happened to me recently, even though it’s not directly related to the hike of today: there’s this thing called YFU, which is an organization that arranges exchange programs for high school students. And there was one exchange student from Japan, Tetsu, whom I hosted at my place recently, because he lives in Düsseldorf and there was a problem with his host family. Anyway, I invited him to my hike. Coming from such a homogeneous society like Japan, it must have been a shock for him to see so many foreigners at the same time.

Right after we left the train station, the path went up, a lot. And this was even better, because there was no real path. Luckily, it was in the woods and we could move freely. So somehow we managed to go through the area. In any case, the feeling of adventure is something that we should not lose, not (only) because out of necessity, but (also) it’s also about exploring a new area. Why not having trouble every now and then?

When we arrived at the top of the mountain, we found a path again. Tetsu was saying he was not expecting a hard hike like this one. That’s good. That’s how we can make a dull ordinary day exciting.

There was a good mixture of fields and forest today, but when we reached the middle, it started rain, and it was exactly when we came out of a forest. Next to me was Clara. I don’t know how much I wanted to accuse her in that moment, even though she was the one who started to complain.

There was a restaurant where I was planning to have a break. As always, I didn’t announce it in the WhatsApp group, because I don’t really check whether it’s really open or not in advance and I don’t want to take responsibility of it. It turned out to be a good decision: closed. The rain had stopped, but it was still wet. Not so nice.

Right after the restaurant, we found a beautiful field, which would have been a perfect place if it was summer. I just find the idea of having to live with this reality until the end of winter so horrifying. Anyway, we decided to stay there. The warm tea that Nikola had was just heavenly. The energizer of Clara we played there left a UFO circle.

We arrived in the city center of Gevelsberg at the end of the hike. Gevelsberg itself was a very small place, but sufficiently large to offer a nice bakery in the city center. We stayed there until the train came. Gevelsberg is definitely going to be a place that we’ll visit at the end of the hike in the near future. So comfortable and good size.