Hiking report

Hiking from Kevelaer to Geldern

As I said in my last post, we’re having a 3-day off this weekend. Out of these 3 days, there were 2 bad days. And we hiked exactly on these 2 days. Who didn’t see this was coming.

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Well, usually there are not so many people over a long weekend anyway, so that I thought maybe I’m gonna put a rather boring one, which was probably not a bad idea because of the weather; at least we were not wasting a beautiful trail on an ugly day. This being said, we came to this area only once before, when we visited Goch, which turned out to be a very good one. So somewhere in my mind, I thought maybe this one might be an interesting one as well.

We took this a diesel train from Düsseldorf to Kevelaer. This is not quite one of the main lines in this area.

Despite the weather forecast, it was not really raining when we arrived there, though the sky was just as gloomy as what you would expect from the German sky late in autumn. Looking around, I had the feeling that I could almost see the horizon. After having done quite a few challenging hikes, it was somewhat refreshing to see such a landscape.

Not only it was flat, but also the trail was asphalted nearly all the time today. And not quite surprisingly, we had to give way to the passing cars. I mean, it’s already fairly bad that it was so flat. Couldn’t I at least have created paths going through forests? At least there were quite a few animals on the way. It gave us the sensation of being in a zoo.

Until right before the break, the situation never really changed. Since the break was planned in a restaurant, which did not lie on the way, we decided to take another path to get there. Well the thing is, Zaman and I got different paths. In particular, Zaman’s one was based on Google Maps and showed a path that was not on Open Street Maps. This is a very rare situation since usually Open Street Maps knows more than Google Maps.

The reason for this became clear very quickly: this path didn’t exist. Actually, it was only partially existent, and the final 300 m or so was not there. But then since we had done the beginning part, we didn’t want to go back either. In the end, we decided to muddle through and got to the restaurant. The moral of this story is essentially, you should never trust Google Maps, especially if it’s in conflict with Open Street Maps.

The staff at the restaurant (Zum Waldschlößchen) refused to let all of us enter. Actually, they didn’t want any of us to enter in the first place, but those who really wanted to order something for lunch got inside. We stayed outside, as it was not raining in that moment, and had lunch. Again, it was not a very attractive area.

The rest was pretty much just as ugly as the first part. Maybe towards the end, something like a quarter of the entire path, was nicely ornamented with trees, a river and more stuff.

Some people ran to catch the train in Geldern. I walked slowly with some other people and had dinner in the city center. This was probably the only one nice moment in today’s hike. I’m so glad that there were not so many people who joined us today. This was really one of the worst ones ever, if not the very worst one.

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