Hiking report

Hiking from Kettwig to Ratingen!

Warm winter is what we had had before. Together with the coronavirus, now comes winter. We were probably rather fortunate that the true misery seemed to be somewhat alleviated today. At least in terms of rain, we were lucky today that we could finally see the blue sky sporadically. Well, we are still in Germany. Who dares to see a clear blue sky.

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It’s been a few weeks since we moved from Couchsurfing to Meetup and Facebook. After a few disastrous sessions, I was still fearful of not having enough participants, which would force me to buy a train ticket, so that I decided to hike in a nearby area. And so, I put Kettwig – Ratingen. So far, I often put Kettwig as the ending point, mainly because it has a neat city center. The problem with Kettwig is the train station: the two stations in Kettwig are somehow both far away from the city center, so that many people simply prefer to not go to the city center from the beginning. So this time I decided to start from Kettwig and go to Ratingen, which also has a nice city center.

I still called this one a winter hike, chiefly because the area around Ratingen (especially towards Duisburg) is usually very flat. Well the beginning was indeed very flat, but this one potentially could have been a normal hike, except for the beginning, as it took quite some time to leave the civilisation. Well look at the photo above (unprocessed) and say it’s spring.

Quite some trees fell down recently. It might have been the storm of last week. There have been a few storms coming to Germany these days. Climate change?

We had a break in a tennis house on the way. As always, there were quite some people who didn’t have lunch today and those who ate outside had to wait for some time. I guess we need a strategy to reduce this discrepancy between the ones who bring food themselves and the ones who eat out…

One of my favourite scenes: endless railway lines. Here, there were at least two lines, but in this area there are more isolated ones, which give a really nice scenery every now and then. Well, this one is also part of Germany’s 38,000 km network. A huge thing anyway.

We got to Ratingen quite early and went to a nearby Extrablatt. Then the hike was over. First time that we got a significant number of people on the hike. It was a good one!

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