Hiking from Oerlinghausen to Bielefeld

There’s this new train called RRX (which is not quite new anymore though), which has foldable desk at each seat and free internet. Its introduction made it super easy for me to travel and work at the same time (as not so surprisingly I’m actually inside the train while writing this report). So I frankly don’t mind going very far these days. And since we got a long weekend until Monday, I decided to organise a trip to Bielefeld, which was something that I had actually organised some time ago but had to cancel, because all the trains got cancelled after the flood of some months ago. It by the way also happened to be the only hike so far that has ever been cancelled.

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While I could be super productive on the train, we almost missed the connection in Bielefeld. Good job German railway.

This area belongs to what’s called Münsterland, which is an extremely flat area. However, there’s this weird hill range going from somewhere around Detmold or Altenbeken up to Osnabrück, along which there’s this hiking trail called Hermannsweg. We did parts of it a few times. And every time I was amazed to be on top of a hill, from where there’s an infinite flat area on both sides. How’s such a thing possible.

Apparently as the train journey was super long, we were only 7 people in total today. The 7 of us then started walking from the train station of Oerlinghausen, first going along the land road, then reached the hills fairly quickly.

It was extremely fortunate that the weather stayed acceptable today, since usually in this period of the year things collapse quite badly. But also because the leaves started to become extremely beautiful and the weather made it also somewhat photogenic.

Today’s trail was little bit hilly, but it was more like a winter hike in total. Well, Hermannsweg is also one of the most established hiking trails in this area, so what else would we expect.

Maybe because the train journey took so much time, but somehow we were super hungry from early on. So we made our first break in the first restaurant we found. I stayed outside in order to cook stuff just like last week, while the others entered the restaurant, only to find out that there was no decent size meal (i.e. only full meals). This showed the strength of my new cooking strategy, as of course I could know beforehand what kind of stuff I could anticipate.

From this break, even though we were only 7 people, the group started to split into two, which didn’t see each other anymore. I belonged to the slower group. As there was a Bismarck tower on the way, we climbed up to the top, and we also decided to have a break at the restaurant where I originally had planned a break.

I really wished I’d be able to take a great photo of the nearby hills on the way, with leaves having different colours ranging from green to red. I never succeeded. Please go there yourself and see what it’s like 🙂

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to visit Bielefeld again. I had to directly go to the train station, where Shrijal and Bogdan were so nice that they decided to wait for me. We reached Düsseldorf at 8:30pm. It became a quite long journey in the end.