Hiking from Walporzheim to Mayschoß through wine stalls

So the summer is coming back again. With this, there are also events like wine or beer festivals. There has already been one wine festival a few weeks ago, when I was running a marathon. Just like at that time, Davy decided to organize a hike. This time it was in the Ahrtal, somewhat far from Düsseldorf. I guess that’s more or less the location that’s the farthest away from Düsseldorf we still do in a day hike

The weather changed quite drastically in the last couple of days. We had an extremely good period of time. Then the whole thing almost fell apart towards the end of the week. It was almost cold yesterday. For my hay fever it was good news though. Actually it was so dry that it was nice that it rained again a little bit.

For some reason I arrived pretty early this morning. I joined everyone in the group, but then I worked all the time on the train till we arrived. I don’t really understand why, but I’m somehow super productive when I’m on the train. I didn’t talk much with the people, but I was very much fulfilled there.

The railway line towards Ahrbrück got damaged in the storm in 2021, and now the railway goes only until Walporzheim. I don’t really understand what makes it so difficult to rebuild it, but I just have to say that it’s really a pity that we cannot reach this beautiful area by train right now. Well today we could at least go to Walporzheim and start our hike there.

The vineyards around here are pretty steep, which is not so surprising given the fact that it’s a valley formed by the river of Ahr. So we had to go up a long way to reach a certain height. That’s more or less where we stayed for the rest of the day.

We could see the construction work to restore the railway line. It looks like an entire overhaul. I read somewhere that it’s gonna be accessible this year, but I strongly doubt that.

Almost as soon as we reached this height, the first wine stalls started appearing. With them, there were also more and more people carrying a wine glass. Despite the rather gloomy weather forecast, there were quite some people who appeared today.

Well, the weather forecast was not so wrong, but also not really right. It was actually pretty good in the end. There were some moments that rain came, but most of the time it stayed pretty ok, and towards the end there was quite some sunshine.

Since the train journey was so long, I started having lunch quite early, when we stopped at one wine stall. People also started drinking quite early to stop at multiple stalls, not like last time when we stopped only towards the end to have a long break. I also had one glass of rosé, which was unfortunately not quite as good as I had hoped. The problem with the Ahrtal is that it’s famous because it’s a very rare red wine region around here, but when it comes to the quality, it can really not compete with French or Italian wine. Pity.

Today’s hike was overall pretty simple. There were still some viewpoints though. We took a lot of pictures along the way.

The unfortunate thing for me was the fact that there was no wine stall towards the end anymore, so that I ended up drinking only this one glass of rosé. In addition, there was also no store or anything around Mayschoß, where we ended, so that we could only wait for the bus. At least I managed to get ice cream at Remagen, where we changed trains.

Well, the adventure could have ended here in a positive way, but obviously the German Railway wouldn’t allow that – there was apparently a tree branch that fell near Bonn, which made it impossible for the train to go farther. I don’t really understand why it was so difficult to remove a branch, and I also don’t really know why they cannot predict how long the track was going to be blocked, but we ended up waiting on the same train for more than 1h. Then we thought it would be a better idea to run to the subway to reach Bonn Central to get another train. We managed to do it and continued our journey with a delay of around 2h. By the time we were leaving Bonn Central, our original train was still stuck, although it could apparently continue a few min later. Eyeyey.