Hiking from Herchen to Dattenfeld

Day before yesterday, I came back from my last business trip. That basically marked the end of the five week stretch of absence from Düsseldorf, with three business trips and two private trips, between which I never stayed in Düsseldorf for more than 24 hours. It’s good to be in good old Düsseldorf. It was also a bit of meteorological rollercoaster, as the temperature skyrocketed last week while I was in France, with the peak temperature nearing 40 degrees both in France and Germany. That’s not exactly the kind of weather for a hike. Fortunately, the temperature dropped drastically towards the end of the week, so much so that it even started raining. It was somewhat unfortunate, since Rohith planned today’s hike with a river at the end. But if you ask me, I’m glad that the temperature dropped, even if that means the weather was to be unstable.

People must have got quite used to not seeing me anymore in the hikes. I joined the group this morning at the train station, and they didn’t seem to wonder who was the person who organized the event on Meetup. I had my time on the train doing some work, and by the time we reached Herchen it felt to me like I had already finished a workday.

I didn’t know anything about it, but apparently today was a special day for cyclists along the Sieg, as the whole street was blocked for them to cycle without cars. There was a house right at the beginning selling waffles outside. It was a bit festive atmosphere. We also got a bit stuck there because some people wanted to have waffles and coffee. Also Rohith was nowhere to see, so we also wanted to wait to see if he’d arrive. As a matter of fact, we saw him only much later, as he was coming by car and was stuck exactly for this reason.

As I have already stated above, we were going along the Sieg today. We could have a quick glimpse into it right at the beginning. It didn’t look particularly inviting, but probably because of the weather. There was a short detour for a viewpoint. Frankly it didn’t really look like a viewpoint.

It was a nice thick forest today. After having lived through a heatwave, it was nice to be in a quiet forest like this one today. Every now and then there were also nice viewpoints over the surrounding areas.

You can see another detour towards the beginning. That’s because there were natural artifacts coming from cooled magma. That was pretty interesting, as those stones were vertically sticking out of the ground.

There was a hut right next to this site, which looked rather new (probably built in 2023), and had a great view over the valley. It was still early, but we decided to have a break there, also because it started raining as well.

The rain unfortunately did not stop, so we went to the next village and stopped in a bakery there. Half of the group never came to the hut and had a stop there anyway, which made the bakery full, but not overcrowded – it wasn’t like we were not few, but the bakery was fairly large, and it looked like it was large because the village just simply had a lot of space, and not because it was expecting a lot of people to come and go. So there was only one lady working there for 30 of us, but she looked happy to have so many customers.

The rain unfortunately did not stop, but the terrain was also not so wild, so with my umbrella I still had a comfortable hike. Every now and then it was somewhat narrow, but it was really only a few meters.

When we reached the river, where we were supposed to swim, it was raining quite heavily. Some people still went into the water, but it looked more like people could call emergency if they didn’t know our actual intention. It must have been freezing there. I stayed away from the whole thing, also because I didn’t have anything to enter the water. Anyway, I didn’t regret my decision.

We didn’t have ice cream afterwards, but at least we had a really nice dinner together back in Düsseldorf. This should happen more often.