Hiking from Lennep to Bornefeld
Autumn is a great season. It’s a rather short period of time, but the most memorable ones (in a positive sense) take place in autumn (or also spring, but there I suffer from hay fever so a bit less…). In order to take advantage of this, we’ve got quite some weekend trips. There was one last week, and next week we’ll be away again. It’s a little bit like a break for me and potentially allows me to see new faces today.
And appropriately enough, I got a great trail around Lennep. We went there recently when it was extremely hot, so I combined it with swimming. This time, it’s purely hiking, and I have to say this area is super promising as it lies on the edge of what’s called Bergisches Land, which tends to be slightly less wild than Sauerland (which is often too wild to me).
I could see quite a few hiking groups these days on MeetUp. All the others limit the number of participants, which is something I don’t really understand. Anyway, it looked like many people couldn’t join the other groups and all of them came to our group, but then as the people in other groups saw that our group was growing, they apparently also decided to join us.
With this, I could see a lot of new faces this morning already at Düsseldorf Central. The group grew steadily as we were nearing Lennep. And at Lennep there was a large group from the Ruhr area waiting for us.
On the map above, you probably get the impression that today’s trail was extremely green. That was very much correct, but it took us still quite some time to cross this small town of Lennep. Except for the city center this town is simply not made for pedestrians.
But as soon as we entered the nature, there was a perfect mixture of everything: forest, fields, lakes etc. With the perfect temperature we got today, I’m pretty sure that I could impress other people at least for the beginning part. The only one thing is that there was hardly any altitude difference. But it was not completely flat either, so I don’t think anyone was particularly unhappy about it.
I cannot really remember how I made this trail, but at least my impression was I made a relatively safe one with no wild path. That was not quite true. There was one part towards the middle of the trail where we couldn’t find the path. We somehow did, but after that the trail became fairly wild, although first it wasn’t too wild for us to go ahead. But then, there was the sign that you can see above, which didn’t mean much, but when we continued our way, the path essentially disappeared. With no clue where we should be heading, we simply continued our way, until someone found a path which clearly didn’t lie on the trail that I had made initially. So if you follow this trail, don’t go straight after the sign above, but turn right. You’ll see that it will look like you’re deviating from the original path, but that’s the right one.
Usually I don’t look for other people, but this time since the path was that wild, I decided to go back to see if everyone could find the way eventually. I could find some of them, others simply took a completely different path. Anyway, we all made it to the point where we had a break.
I was planning to have a break at Bornefeld, but while I was looking for other people before break, the others decided to settle on a very large field, a super beautiful one. This is another great thing about Lennep: we are in the nature, but the proximity to the civilization offers us a bit of grass fields.
There were only a few small sections of concrete road after this. To be honest, the trail was so good that it could have been part of something more official, like Neanderlandsteig. Maybe it’s time to think about creating a new one around Lennep (although the Wuppertalsperre-side isn’t quite as interesting).
Anyway, we made a significant contribution to the local economy of Lennep afterwards by buying ice creams and coffee etc. That was great because I really like that place :).
Special thanks to Wilhelm for bringing me back home to Düsseldorf by car (because there weren’t enough tickets).
