Hiking from Wuppertal Oberbarmen to Unterbarmen!

It’s incredible how the weather can possibly be so sunny while the news is covered with gloomy updates all the time all over Europe these days. It’s still early March, but we got yet again such a perfect weather.

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Accordingly, we had a quite large group of people this time as well. This time, for the second time after yesterday’s hike, I created a Telegram group instead of a WhatsApp group, which had around 40 people. With the WhatsApp group, the number of real participants was about the same as the number of virtual participants in the group. As it turned out, it was more or less the same with Telegram. Apparently, some people really downloaded Telegram for this purpose. Let’s see how it’s going to look in the future.

The train going from Düsseldorf to Wuppertal was miraculously punctual. We then crossed this super ugly area of Oberbarmen and started hiking. In fact, while Wuppertal is a narrow valley, it took quite some time to reach the nature, and some people even started wondering whether it was meant to be a city hike in the end.

Today’s hike was a strong contrast to yesterday’s one – with a lot more trees. This essentially shows the stark difference between the Sauerland and the Bergisches Land. To be honest it makes me almost sad to look at the landscapes in the Sauerland. How’s that possible that people leave that like that.

There was one point towards the beginning, where people were somewhat lost. The problem is, I knew where to go, and I thought I gave the correct sign, but most of them didn’t realise that I kept going and they essentially stayed where they were. Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t realise that you guys didn’t realise I kept going.

I said there were a lot more trees, but there were a lot of fields today as well. But the fields in this area were meant to be fields, and not because they happened to be fields because there were no trees. Just like always here in Wuppertal, there were somehow a lot of dogs there. Do people in Wuppertal have more dogs? The large group of people on the photo above is us ?

We had a break at the same tower as when we were hiking in March 2018 (although at that time there were a lot more people than this time). It’s just a perfect place. I got a large portion of French fries in the nearby restaurant, which to be honest I shouldn’t have ordered. Since it was still very cold today, we had a relatively short break again like yesterday.

Maybe I should have mentioned in the beginning that today’s trail was really extremely random. So random that now after the hike I start wondering what I would have done if the paths didn’t exist, because in some places there was no Plan B. Anyway things went quite well, except for the fact that we took wrong paths everywhere. In total, I’m sure that we walked much more than we were supposed to.

Unfortunately there was no ice cream at the end (because it’s Unterbarmen), but there was a comfortable direct train to Düsseldorf, where I actually had an ice cream. I finish writing this article by leaving the photo here, which shows how much the German railway confused everyone for not giving the platform numbers at Wuppertal-Unterbarmen, while the platform numbers were given in the apps. Well, the train came anyway, so I don’t complain.