Hiking from  Niederdollendorf to Rhöndorf

And here comes Davy again, which means the hike is somewhere south of Bonn. This time it’s the good old Königswinter, although for some reason he didn’t include Drachenfels. Well we’ve been there so many times.

The drama started in the morning. As we were doing some work in the apartment yesterday, on top of the fact that we went to Ina’s birthday party and came back fairly late, I couldn’t leave the apartment very early. So I decided to take an EC to catch up. Then two things happened: firstly the DB server was down, so that not only I couldn’t buy a train ticket, but also I couldn’t even check the schedule. Then the EC left two minutes earlier than planned. I was standing in front of the train, desperately trying to open the door, while knowing that it was still not the departure time. Good job Deutsche Bahn.

Anyway I then decided to join the group one hour later. So stupid.

Davy decided to include quite a few mountain tops in this hike, but it was quite easy to make shortcuts for me. It took maybe only half an hour or so for me to catch up with the group. Today’s group was totally divided into two. The first group was walking fairly fast, while the slower group was so slow that I didn’t even see them while catching up the faster group.

Indeed, when we had a break at Ölberg, I was already done with my lunch when the slower group arrived. There was a huge discussion over how it was possible that the hike was so difficult even though Komoot was saying the difficulty is intermediate. I also couldn’t really explain it, until Rahul told me that Davy had changed the fitness level, so that the hike says it’s intermediate. That’s a kind of things that I would never do, as it makes no problem for the people to overestimate the difficulty, but it could potentially become a huge problem when they underestimate it. Besides this difficulty is only an indication for the new comers, as the more experienced ones would look at the distance and height difference, so it’s killing its own purpose. Anyway let’s see how he’s gonna organize it next time.

I have a couple of pictures from the top of the Ölberg, but it must have been a long time ago that we went there the last time. As it was fairly warm today, it was really nice to have a break there. On the other hand, the weather has been a little too good for me to make a coffee, as the environment looked fairly dry, so this time no coffee. Pity.

I thought it might be a good idea to take a group picture there, but Davy insisted on taking it on top of the Löwenburg, so we simply continued.

Right from the beginning after the break the two groups before the break were separated. We practically didn’t see them anymore till the end. There were a few viewing locations along the way. That’s a cool thing about this area. Well, right now in the winter it doesn’t look particularly impressive though.

Löwenburg was full of people. It was like they all decided to come out because spring arrived. We took a group picture with the people from the first group.

There was one more peak to climb up, but by this time I was bored to see yet another peak, so I simply waited for the others to go up and down. How can they be so motivated to do pretty much the same thing so many times.

There was one ice cream shop which was open after the hike. We went there and almost as soon as we got ice cream, we had to hurry to the train station, as apparently there was some problem at Cologne and we had to take a huge detour. Anyway, we combined it with a horrible Ind