Hiking from Kestert to St. Goarshausen

As I stated in a recent article, I started thinking about organizing long distance hikes on Saturdays and normal hikes on Sundays. Today’s one a slightly experimental, because it even went outside of VRS, far from the NRW border into Rhineland Palatinate.

Download kml / gpx

Not so surprisingly, there was a huge chaos in the Telegram group concerning the train tickets. This time, it was not only one group ticket in question (Quer-Durchs-Land-Ticket), but also the Rheinland-Pfalz-Ticket, depending on where you live and what kind of ticket you have. I must say, while there was indeed this chaos, I really appreciated three functionalities in Telegram. One is to pin messages, so that I could simply pin my message making clear who belongs to which group. Secondly, it’s possible to edit messages in Telegram, so that I could update the list as discussion went ahead. Lastly, for small comments like “Thanks” or “Yes”, you can use inline reactions in Telegram, so that you don’t fill up the chat so quickly. In fact, I found out this feature of pinning messages only during the discussion, and as soon as I activated it the discussion was much more organized.

I went to the train station relatively early this morning, to make sure that we would be able to organize the train ticket early enough, just in case there’s someone joining who’s not on Telegram. In the end, there was no bad surprise in the morning and including the change in Koblenz things went perfectly.

Today’s track, from Kestert to St. Goarshausen, followed the Rheinsteig. Just like everywhere along the Rheinsteig, we had a huge slope right from the beginning, where we apparently lost quite a few people right away. Since it was still fairly cold last week, I was carrying a winter coat, and I was totally in sweat when we arrived on the top.

After the first slope, things were much more relaxed. We also had a great view over the Rhine all the time. Today, it was still relatively colorless, but in a few months I’m sure that the landscape is going to be impressive.

There were a few view points on the way. Actually the terrain was rocky every now and then, so that it somewhat gave us the impression of being along the Mediterranean or something.

This time, since it was south of Koblenz, I also posted the event in the Koblenz expat group, which was not specifically for hikes (because there wasn’t one for Koblenz), but apparently still some people from that group joined us. In total, there were really a lot of people who joined for the first time. Some people walked really well, others visibly had more difficulties.

We had a break at Wellnich, where I thought there’d be a restaurant. As it turned out, there wasn’t, but it was still a nice place to sit right in front of the Rhine.

You can actually clearly see it in the height profile, but there was a long slope from Wellnich. I almost had the feeling that we were going to walk forever.

Towards the top of this hill, there was this Burg Maus, which is the counterpart of Burg Katz, but it was closed. Good that I didn’t make it the highlight of the day.

After Burg Maus, there were also a few large fields. In this regard, we had forests, fields and a few places with great views. I must say this one was one of the best sections I had along the Rheinsteig.

There was no place for ice cream in St. Goarshausen, so we went back to Koblenz and went to a local ice cream parlor ??