Hiking from Velbert to Kettwig

There’s this city called Velbert, which lies inside the south VRR circle (which is contoured by Düsseldorf-Wuppertal-Hagen-Dortmund-Essen-Duisburg). Quite famously, the outline of this circle is connected by a railway line, with one line of exception that connects Wuppertal and Essen in the middle. Velbert, being not exactly in the middle of the south VRR circle, missed this Wuppertal-Essen railway line, has no train station, even though this city itself is not that small. Therefore, we have in the last two years always avoided this city. This time, since because of the temperature there weren’t so many participants expected, we decided to take a bus from Essen Werden to Velbert. And this marked the very first hike in which it was planned beforehand to take a bus. Whereas I had personally been always horrified by this idea, fortunately it was a 2-coach bus that was operated between Essen Werden and Velbert. Even though it was certainly not as comfortable as riding a train, it is definitely a possibility to count on in the organisation of future hikes. By the way, it was fairly difficult to find the bus stop at Essen Werden, which was not right in front of the train station (even though there’s s mini-terminal there), but we had to walk to the north a little along the main street.

January in the Ruhr region. I guess we can be happy that it was only sporadically showering. From the beginning to the end, we had beautiful fields, forests, and other nice scenes. While taking each photo, I had to think how beautiful it would have been if only the weather had been better.

I had thought about having a break at Heiligenhaus, which is a small city, but had a few restaurants/cafés/hotels inside. I guess at normal times, this is a great place to have a break during the hike. Unfortunately for being the first weekend this year, pretty much everything was closed. We were having a break at a local tennis club, which at least allowed us to stay dry while it actually started raining again.

At this point we were already really exhausted. I was telling everyone that less than a half was remaining and there was no uphill anymore. This was not quite true. Again, I’m pretty sure that the landscape would have been wonderful if only the weather had been better. The bad weather I guess had also contributed to the exhaustion of everyone.

At the end of the hike, we had this nice view over Kettwig from the top of a hill. The problem was that it was starting to become dark very quickly. Since I knew everyone was exhausted, I was trying to find an easier path, which turned out to be way more complicated in the end. So instead of going down slowly, we almost had to go down a cliff. What a luck that nothing happened. The trail given in the link above does not contain this dangerous path so please don’t deviate from the trail given there.

So in the end, this one hike did not particularly impress me, but probably this was mainly because of the weather. It’s certainly worth trying it out again when the weather is good.