Hiking from Schwerte to Dortmund

The summer-ish days vanished all of a sudden with the first drops of rain this week. To be honest, I was slightly relieved, not only because it was quite hot (close to 30 degrees when we hiked last Monday), but also there was virtually no rain for weeks. I could see the suffering of the plants from the window of my room.

Download kml / gpx

After more than 150 hikes I’m starting to realise that there isn’t an infinite number of trails in VRR. Looking at the map, I see that the area around Wuppertal or Essen is covered with trails we have already done. Even though they are lines, it looks almost like they make up an area in total.

What I didn’t realise for a long time is that there’s this place called Dortmund, which I thought was an industrial city, but as I found out there’s an interesting (-looking) area between the city and the river Ruhr. We walked a few times over there, and I was surprised to see that it’s more like a wild area than what I thought Dortmund would look like.

We were in Schwerte for the second time – the first time was around 3 years ago, and we went to the other side. Of course I didn’t recognize anything. Well, this being said, a bit of preparation beforehand might have been nice, since we had to walk along quite large streets in the first 15 min or so. At one point, there was even a person saying he was quitting the group for this reason.

The ones who stayed could at least see that this was not all about the hike today. We entered a well maintained forest, a kind of forest where the trees are planted in a quite regular manner, as you can often see in the Ruhr area. A bit of nature. Why not.

In today’s perfect hiking weather, we had something like 40 people in total. To be fair, it was a bit stressful, always for the same reason in the last couple of weeks: social distancing. At least today I didn’t have to see people actively break the rule today, so I’m gonna call it progress. I really hope that the restrictions are going to be lifted at the end of the month, really.

I kind of have the feeling that I created this trail long time ago, when I was drinking beer in the evening alone, where I had essentially nothing to do and decided to create a trail. Frankly, the part around Syburg looked exactly like what a drunk person would make. No elegance or whatever, these were just random streets with absolutely no goal. I hope people didn’t see it that way.

We had a break near this place called Roadstop, where we also had a break some time ago, but if I remember well, at that time it was raining and this it time it was a pretty nice weather. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a particularly good place for a break, but I also like this kind of random roadside stop.

Except for the constant noise of cars passing by, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about today’s hike, but I somehow didn’t really enjoy it. Maybe because of the stress related to the social distancing rule. There was indeed one person passing by, stating that we must have forgotten the law. In that moment that statement was not quite pertinent, since we were keeping distance and as a sport activity it is indeed legal. But frankly, the fact that I had to see how we were doing was a stressful thing.

Until the end of this month, we’ll be having either two hikes every weekend or a weekend trip, so I hope there won’t be too many people joining on the hikes in the coming weeks.