Hiking from Halle to Bielefeld!

So the summer promotion of VRR is now over – essentially we came back to the normality. But hey there are still interesting sites in NRW and we are anyway doing two hikes a week right now. Why not visit some of them now?

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With this in mind, I decided to go to Bielefeld this weekend. With my BahnCard, it’s actually also not so expensive for me to go there.

I was actually expecting a lot of people from the area around Bielefeld. However, we got mostly people from Düsseldorf and Köln. They got a group ticket and went to Bielefeld. It’s a pity because I also wanted to hear from the local people about more sites around Bielefeld. Well maybe next time.

The weather was already gloomy in Düsseldorf, but right before the train arrived in Bielefeld, it even started raining. It could be considered as bad luck since we had good days for more than a week and today happened to get a bad weather. But in reality, it was also a break of the ongoing heatwave. I’m sort of glad that we had rain.

As I indicated above, this was an area that I wanted to see, because the trail we were doing today was a part of what’s called Hermannsweg. We did some parts some time ago, once to visit Externsteine, and once to visit Hermannsdenkmal. This is a range of hills in the middle of a flat land, stretching from somewhere around Detmold to somewhere close to Osnabrück. It looks almost like a geographical anomaly to me, but anyway it’s an interesting area. Why not visit it?

The beginning, where we were essentially crossing Halle, was marked with a lot of rain. It’s been sometime since we had such a continuous rain during a hike. Well, again, it was at least not hot today. Good enough.

After the city, there was a gradual slope leading to the mountain range that I talked about above. The area was completely covered with trees, but it was a neatly organized forest path, with no complication at all. Over the course of today’s trail, there was not even a single location of steep path. This could have almost been a winter hike.

As the rain was getting weaker, it was getting misty around us. I guess we could have had a view over the area surrounding us from where we were, but we could hardly see anything. At some point it was so misty that we had to pay attention to cyclists that sporadically appeared all of a sudden.

Most of today’s low number of participants were there for the first time. Usually we get many Germans when the weather is bad, but today there was only one. Weird.

We had a break at this restaurant called Peter auf’m Berg. All the others wanted to have a break outside, but since I didn’t have lunch and I was super hungry, I went there alone and got a sandwich.

While I was sitting in the restaurant, the rain stopped entirely. The others apparently simply stayed in the forest.

As the mist was also disappearing, we could also sometimes see the surrounding area. Well, there was nothing spectacular though. I still don’t understand why there were these hills in the middle of so large flat area.

There was an open zoo towards then. Unfortunately it was not completely open from anywhere today due to the coronavirus. I don’t understand the logic, but it’s not the first time that I don’t understand coronavirus measures. We aren’t necessarily surprised anymore.

As I got an ICE ticket back to Düsseldorf for a train leaving later in the evening, I got some time to take a look at the city in Bielefeld. It was interesting to see the amount of people outside. Is it the same in Düsseldorf Saturdays?

Well then I got an ICE to go back to Düsseldorf. The ICE is so much nicer than the local trains that I can’t take local trains anymore :D.