Hiking from Lüttringhausen to Schwelm

Sometimes small mistakes have a huge consequence.

We all know that whatever happens with the German railway, there’s no surprise at all. For example it is very common that the train display shows non-existent connections, or the announcement gives completely wrong information. We’re used to it, and we usually notice the problem, or at least the problems have never really affected us. Until today. The station we wanted to reach today was Lüttringhausen. From Wuppertal-Oberbarmen, where we changed trains, there’s only one train station in between: Ronsdorf. The thing is, the announcement completely skipped Ronsdorf and gave Lüttringhausen directly. I didn’t notice – after all I was not sure myself if Lüttringhausen was coming first or Ronsdorf, and most of the people didn’t either. It was only when I checked my GPS position that we were in a completely different place, but then it was also too late to catch the train again.

Download kml / gpx

So, we simply started hiking. The distance between Ronsdorf and Lüttringhausen was anyway not very large. Well, I have to admit it was also not quite a lovely area, but fine it could have been much worse in NRW.

There’s this one guy, Hari, who usually asks a lot of questions, like where to have a break and what would be the plan at the end the hike etc. The thing is, I usually have vague ideas but there’s nothing fixed in this group, which means there’s no reason to consult me to do things. With this in mind, I decided to make him lead the group, to make him see how easy it actually is to lead this group and decide what to do in which moment. And frankly, he did it very well. I hope he’ll continue doing the job in the future as well :).

Today, we walked from the S7 line to Schwelm, which is usually a relatively large distance. Actually exactly in the middle, there was a railway line, which went out of service long time ago. I find it fascinating to see a piece of history in the middle of nowhere, like the photo above.

Just as I reported last week, the second wave of corona is hitting hard all countries across Europe. Germany has been largely spared so far, but it’s getting worse day by day. And just like last week, all the other events got cancelled, so that many people joined our group. Luckily, the weather was quite horrible today. Just like every autumn, there was this constant rain – never too strong but never ending. Still, I guess we were around 30 people today. That’s remarkable for the cold weather and rain.

Luckily, since some people actually managed to go to Lüttringhausen, and some people followed Hari, we never formed a large cluster today. And we had a break in completely different places. Actually I don’t even know where most of the people went. And to be honest, I don’t even know who joined us today. It should be like this. Today was a perfect example for a great hike during corona, with no large group in a large event.

When we started moving again, we were almost feeling cold. End of October, it’s like winter here in Germany. I moved quickly forward, in the hope to warm up and also disperse the (relatively small) crowd. We walked to the end of Beyerburg (where we had a break) and went right through the hill that snuck up on us. I knew this one, because when we went there last time (I needed quite some time to find the right event because we’ve been to Schwelm so many times) I gathered so many complaints. And so I loved this place and really looked forward to coming back here 🙂

I thought there was almost nothing anymore to see around Schwelm, but the path I chose this time turned out to be quite good. Now looking at where we walked, I have to say it was a risky choice. But I’d say it could be a nice official hiking trail.

At some point, I realised that this was part of a hiking trail when we had a windstorm, where I nearly got killed by a falling tree. At that time, we gave up at some point and walked along the national road because it was really seriously windy, but I didn’t correct the map afterwards. So, actually we were walking a path that we hadn’t seen before. Well not that it was extremely interesting though :).

When we reached Schwelm, I saw Nikola for the second time today, who took me on his ticket to Lüttringhausen in the first place. Again, I have no idea how people hiked today, but I have to say I’d like the events to be always like this in the future. Let’s see what I can do about it.