Hiking from Wittbräucke to Wetter

May started. It’s a very weird period of time here in Germany, as so many holidays appear at once in May and June, frankly only disrupting my life. Anyway there was one this week, the Labour Day. Since I didn’t really know what we were going to do after the Labour Day, I hadn’t set any event there, and I put an event only towards the end of the week, where the weather forecast was announcing rain for Sunday. So I put a relatively simple hike from Wittbräucke to Wetter, which was relatively rain-tight, as there was nothing really complicated on the way.

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I had feared there wouldn’t be anyone at all because of the weather and because it was very late. In reality, however, there were more than 10 people signing up. Not bad.

But hey weather is obviously not the biggest problem here in Germany. Actually not even a little bit, compared to the biggest tumour of Germany: German railway. They of course decided to bring the maximum disorder by getting a delay of nearly 1h on the way from Düsseldorf to Dortmund. From what I heard from Hilal, there was apparently someone who activated the emergency brake, because he thought he was stalked by someone. I guess the real problem is the fact that no one really cares whether there was a delay or not. The police did not even bother to get off the train with this guy. Instead they interrogated the guy on the train and made everyone wait. Brilliant idea.

So we missed our connection, but then took the one that departed one hour later. At least we did not need to wait too long at the train station in this regard. We thought about going elsewhere, but I couldn’t come up with a different idea, and it turned out to be also important to go to Wittbräucke because some people were waiting for us there.

There’s basically nothing in Wittbräucke. For this reason, we were almost immediately in a forest. As I already stated above, I did not want to make a complicated hike today due to potential rain. So it was only a relatively short section in the forest, and we were walking along the Ruhr for a very long time.

I thought it would be not only boring, but also super annoying, because there tend to be a lot of cyclists along the Ruhr. However, for this part it turned out to be a pedestrian zone. Of course there were some E bikes, but otherwise it was kind of very calm for us.

Besides there were also locations to have nice photos, as people apparently also tried to make the riverside kind of nice.

We have been to Herdecke a few times before. It was mainly whenever the weather was not really good. Today, as it was sort of ok, we stayed along the river and had lunch there. There was also an ice cream van nearby.

Herdecke was somehow constructed on a quite steep place. We were walking up quite a hill to reach the top of the mountain. Well I don’t know whether I can call it a mountain because it’s NRW after all.

There was this one tower we often see along the way. It’s more like a failed monument but hey it’s still something to see. And yeah we still somehow enjoyed it.

We arrived at Wetter some time before the train was leaving. Unfortunately the ice cream parlour was closed, but instead we had a really nice dinner in Düsseldorf, so I don’t complain.