Hiking from Niederdollendorf to Bonn

What a week.

It was only a few weeks ago that it looked more like a joke that Russians might invade Ukraine. This week it happened. Now for the first time in 2 years corona is not dominating the news, and I’m pretty sure that it’s so different from what everyone had imagined.

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Whether this is the reason or because it’s the carnival weekend, there were actually not many people signing up for today’s event, even though the weather was perfect and we were going to this great place called Siebengebirge, which famous places like Drachenfels also belong to.

Since it was outside VRR, we decided to buy an NRW ticket, which is a 5-p ticket that becomes less expensive than buying two EinfachWeiterTicket, if there are at least 4 people. Fortunately we got indeed 5 people today. The others somehow decided to take a very early train, which later turned out to be a great idea, because the one with the perfect connection got cancelled. Long live German railway.

Just like everywhere below Bonn, Niederdollendorf was a city that lied along the Rhine. It took us only a few minutes to get into the hills there. At the beginning it was a little bit hilly, but then it stayed more or less flat for the rest of the day. Well, after all I also intentionally took this relatively easy trail because the winter is not totally gone.

It also coincided partly with the first part of the Rheinsteig. Since it was still very close to Bonn, it was very different from the areas we know around Koblenz, but it was still a nice one.

There were also places with a great view every now and then. Well, “great” might be a bit relative, because the other side of the Rhine was not that spectacular around this area.

I was thinking about having a break in this place called Niederholtorf, but we couldn’t find a nice spot there, so we went a bit farther and stayed in the middle of the forest. There was a restaurant on the way, but I’m not sure if there was someone who went there (it looked like a nice Balkan restaurant though).

Again, after the break there were some viewpoints, and there was this one random church, but other than that it was really more like a comfortable winter hike in the end. Well, today was the last winter hike for this season, so I’d say we can now totally look forward to the upcoming ones.

We had an ice cream at the end. It was horrible but at least we accomplished the most important part of the hike 🙂

The hike was meant to end at Bonn Beuel, but since the train connection was quite bad, we decided to go to the central station, also because someone said it’s a beautiful area. I’m not really sure how beautiful it was in the end, but Bonn is a cosy small city that requires only half an hour or so to cross. Above you see the photo of the Rhine from the main bridge.