Hiking from Nideggen to Heimbach!

Since the introduction of the 9-euro ticket, we always went either outside of NRW or towards the Northwest of NRW. Today, pretty much for the first time since then, we hiked in the nearby area, in the Eifel.

Download kml / gpx

One cool thing about this this area around the lake Rur is the fact that the water is very clean and there are plenty of opportunities to swim. And as we had a huge heatwave this week, I thought it was a really good idea.

And as always, our train got cancelled. Super luckily, there was another train coming 20 min later which allowed me to take more or less the same connection. In the meantime, the train from Bonn apparently also got cancelled. They had no alternative.

Nideggen is somewhere along the river Rur. There’s a campsite nearby but there’s nothing else there. Accordingly, we were almost immediately in the forest. Actually not only in the forest, we went up the hill to the top, where there’s the Nideggen castle. There are not so many steep hills in the Eifel like this one, in contrast to the area along the Rhine. A hard walk right from the beginning but the view from the top was rewarding.

Today we were only 9 people. During the corona restrictions, there used to be a lot of people, because there was virtually no one else organizing hike and everyone joined me, but now as the restrictions are gone, there are more and more groups and accordingly there are less people joining me now. As always, I like both big groups and small groups, because they have cool aspects individually. I was learning Arabic today. Let’s see how far I’m gonna go with the language 😀

Before the break, we were walking in the forest pretty much all the time. The heatwave is already gone, but as it was a very hot day, it was nice to be in the shadow there.

In today’s hike, I planned to have two breaks, because there was this first city,  Abenden, which was before the half point, and the other city, Hausen, which was close to the end, and therefore we couldn’t have had a nice break in the middle. I was planning to swim in the river, but I ended up sleeping away the whole break :D. Some people went to a nearby café. It was such a peaceful place with a lot of day trippers.

We had fields after the first break. I really liked the golden fields under the blue sky, but it was just too hot today, so we changed the route a bit to walk inside the forest.

As the first break was fairly long, we had a small one at Hausen. Today’s hike was actually an expert one according to Komoot. It was indeed not very easy and one person left us at Hausen.

It looked like there was another mountain in the last part, but it was a much milder. And we were in the forest again.

I always thought the 2018 drought did not affect the Eifel area, but today I could sporadically see areas, where there were dead trees. It was definitely not nearly as bad as in the Sauerland or Harz, but I was surprised to see this also in the Eifel.

Heimbach is a relatively touristic area. There was obviously an ice cream parlor there. And we were exactly in time for the departure of our train. What a perfect day.