Hiking report

Hiking from Lüttringhausen to Lennep!

This year’s heatwave has been so far somewhat milder than last year’s one, but it seems to persist longer. Today, despite the rain yesterday, it was still hot. It was fortunate that I put an event in Lennep, where I didn’t have to change much to include Wuppertalsperre, a local lake where it’s officially allowed to swim, which is something very rare in a country where virtually everything appears to be forbidden.

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We’ve been to Lennep several times and once we also went to the lake (cf. this report). Except for the lake, there was nothing particularly memorable about that hike. Today’s one worried me a little bit, due to the amount of concrete that we’d have to see. Well, it’s probably now also okay to do a hike that’s just okay after so many special sessions that we’ve done this year.

As Zaman didn’t join today and I couldn’t quite expect anyone to take a lead, I led the group at the beginning. It looked almost like I simply left the group. Maybe I should have told the others beforehand that I had to do that to make sure that the group gets far apart, in order to avoid clusters. Can you still see the group of people in the photo?

And then, what I had feared happened: there was hardly any shade on the way and there was so much concrete on the way. Right behind me was Soheila, who was a muslim and had to wear long sleeves and long trousers. I’m sorry that she had to go through this. I was myself sweating endlessly.

Well, this being said, it was not quite as bad as I had initially thought. The paths were mostly like the one that you can see above and not like real streets with cars.

My biggest concern of the day was limited access to the lake. This fortunately was not the case. There were some staff controlling the people entering the area, but that was it. That’s probably also the right solution, because this year they limited access to everywhere, so that people were forced to do illegal things.

This lake is an amazing place. I’m really glad that it was included inside the VRR area. When we arrived there, I didn’t even look back and directly entered the water.

I was surprised to see that many people were not quite interested to swim. They mostly stayed in the shadow. Well, it was still a nice area to be so why not? As always, there were super long queues in front of the small shop selling French fries and ice creams.

After a very long break of 1h30, we started walking towards Lennep. This part was mostly covered with trees, which was a quite important strategy for me. I hope the lake and this second part wiped out the memory of the first part :).

Lennep is a nice small city, which we’ve visited several times. It was never quite a flourishing city, but today we could see that many shops were closed. The shop you see on the photo above has been closed certainly for quite some time, but many others looked like they were open until recently. Well, the corona wave probably didn’t spare a small town like this one. I hope our small contributions after the hike (ice cream etc.) will make it at least slightly better for them :).

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