Hiking from Langenberg to Holthausen

After the weekend hike to Heidelberg last week, we got a few days with good weather, but just like many weekends, it essentially ended yesterday. And today, we could hardly see the sun. Well who cares. Compared to the heat wave of last year, we’re enjoying being outside anyway.

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Since the introduction of the VRR promotion at the beginning of this summer, we usually went quite far for the hikes. Today, since I was going to a birthday party in Essen, we came back to the VRR area again. This initially attracted quite a large number of people, but then maybe because of the weather, maybe because there was some local calling today’s hike a “torture” (yes, German people use a quite strong language for subtle things), a lot of people signed off in the end. But then this allowed us to keep the number of participants under 30, in which case the social distancing rule doesn’t apply anymore. Perfect.

Just like every time in the last few weeks, we immediately started hiking as soon as we arrived at the train station. As there was no one like Zaman, I was simply leading the group for something like more than half the trail.

The last minute changes played a super important role. Today’s hike showed how beautiful an area around Düsseldorf could be. There were some wild parts as well, which was something I had feared when I modified the trail, although I then realized that with the number of other options available there it was not that critical that they could be complicated. But then it was also never too complicated, so it might have given some taste to the otherwise rather regular hike today.

I mentioned it already several times, but this area close to Velbert offers a few places where you have a nice vier over fields. As the landscape is somewhat hilly, but then also never too mountainous, sometimes we could see a bit of field, sometimes we could see a large area with a varying landscape.

As there were two restaurants along the way, I wanted to have a break close to one of them. Unfortunately, they were both closed, but still we had a break in a field nearby. Since the trail itself was not particularly long, maybe it was fine that there was no restaurant. It was only there that I realized that there were only 16 people. And frankly, with a group of 16 people no one seems to be surprised anymore.

There was a small section after the break where we had to go right next to cars, but it was only a short part. We could enter the nature again quickly. Well, maybe I should also mention that there was a small section towards the where there were quite some bikes. I was expecting this and since the weather was also not particularly good today, we were not affected so much.

When we arrived at the station, it started pouring. We could stay under the roof. Such a perfect timing.