Hiking from Leutesdorf to Bad Hönningen

There are different incidents that took place over the last few years as we went hiking in so many different places, but there has never been a hike, where we left people at the platform on the way. Well here’s what happened today.

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Today, we were hiking from Leutesdorf to Bad Hönningen, and for this we needed to change trains at Köln Ehrenfeld. All those people coming from the north, mainly from Essen and Düsseldorf, were on the same train as me. When we arrived at Ehrenfeld, since we had something like 20 min, we Shrijal, Amir and I decided to go to a nearby bakery to get coffee. Amir was quick and went back to the platform. Shrijal and I, on the other hand, needed some more time and went back to the platform in the last minute. Since we didn’t have time and anyway people are super autonomous, we simply entered the train, which started moving right away. From the window of the moving train, we could see people at the platform. Apparently they were not paying attention. Anyway they were destined to come one hour later, which happened to be the case for many other people, even though for various reasons.

When we arrived at Leutesdorf, we were around 10 people.

There was this amazing collection of different types of grape. It’s a wine region here, and their white wines tend to be pretty good.

Today, we were pretty much following one section of Rheinsteig, which goes from somewhere around Wiesbaden to Bonn. It’s a very famous hiking route, and usually it attracts really a lot of people. Today, for some reason there were not so many people on the way, even though it was just as impressive.

There were some difficult sections at the beginning as well. Here on the photo, there was a rope, but the path was a little bit reminiscent of Marseille.

Except for this first part, there was pretty much nothing particularly difficult today. At some point before the break, there were castle ruins, which we didn’t plan to visit at the beginning, but since we  were kind of waiting for the ones who missed the connection, we decided to go up there. There was a beautiful view over the Rhine, with so much less water these days, as there was hardly any rain in the last couple of weeks. It looks almost like the drought of a few years ago.

Today, there were berries everywhere. Also we could find plums. I had the feeling that we were eating stuff everywhere along the way. Amazing! But again, there were some places where the berries clearly needed some water.

It was when we were eating berries that the others finally joined us. Good job.

We had a break in Hammerstein, where I had seen a few restaurants before organising this event. Unfortunately they were all closed, some of them because they are having vacations. I went to the Rhine, which we found out was a really nice place to sit. Some other people apparently continued and had a break in a totally different place.

It was yet another really hot day. I had finished my water during the break. Fortunately, I could ask some local people, who gave me some water (and I could drink some water in that moment as well). He really saved my life.

There was a small hut on top of a hill. Yet another spot to have a brilliant view over the surrounding area. Again, we could see that the Rhine was not having enough water anymore.

I’ve been looking for beautiful lone-standing trees. This one is not really impressive, but still a nice one. There is actually one person on the photo, can you see them??

Yet another scene with a lot of hungry kids gathering plums. Well, I was actually the one who was stuck there the longest XD

There was unfortunately no ice cream parlour at the end (there was one, but it was too far away). We simply had drinks in the bar right next to the train station. God it was a hot day today.