Hiking from Lengerich to Bad Iburg

As you might already know, north of North Rhine Westphalia is mostly flat, but there are a few hill range that go from east to west, mostly drawing the same arch as the boundary to Lower Saxony. Today, we walked from Lengerich to Bad Iburg, which lies exactly in this hill range, for me a little bit to see what the area looks like.

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There was a perfect connection from Düsseldorf to Lengerich, the one that goes to Osnabrück, and the one before Osnabrück (or maybe one more?) happened to be Lengerich. Since it was going over most of the stops in the Ruhr area, people could simply join on the way. Well, I should have noticed that the train station was actually different from the one that I thought it was, so that we had to go our way first to join the original plan at the beginning.

Today was yet another day with the perfect weather. It’s not atypical in this time of the year, but elsewhere in Europe there’s apparently a huge problem of drought right now. Anyway it was accordingly quite hot, but fortunately we were mostly staying in shadows, and it was only every now and then that we were exposed to the sunlight.

I was expecting an area like Hermannsdenkmal oder Externsteine, but as it turned out the area right next to it was something like a limestone mine (?). At least we could hardly say that the view was impressive from where we were. It was a pity because it was actually a vast area that we could see from the top of the hills.

As you can see in the profile above, it was a fairly flat trail today, although we were on different hills all the time. Along the path, we could find a lot of wild berries. Here you can see one scene when people were eating them. They were still small, but there were so many of them that the group got totally separated at some point.

It was almost towards the end that we had a break today. In fact I didn’t know what kind of place it was, but as it turned out it was a beer garden, and there was this horrible live concert of German music. I just innerly prayed they would stop singing, but as it never happened, I stayed there only briefly. Besides the cake I got was horrible and the staff not particularly friendly. Well it was at least a nice area.

It was only when we arrived in Bad Iburg that there was actually no train station there. Instead we had to take a bus going to Osnabrück. Really fortunately, we arrived in the right moment for the bus, otherwise we could have waited more than an hour or so. From Osnabrück we took a train back to Düsseldorf, with no delay. Besides I had an ice cream in Bad Iburg. Perfect!