Hiking near Marl Sinsen!

VRR region, which is a part of North Rhine-Westphalia where we can go everywhere for free with the monthly ticket (which I do not possess), is actually much larger than what we have seen until last month. The problem is related to the fact that the north and the west of this region is fairly flat, so we don’t go hiking there very often (even though for me it is not important that it’s hilly/mountainous). Last week, we went to Venlo, which was very flat. This time, I wanted to go to the North of VRR region. I chose Sinsen, which is largely unknown here in Düsseldorf. Unfortunately, the event I posted there was not shown in Düsseldorf area on couch surfing. For last week’s event, I created an event on Facebook, but since it turned out to be even tougher than organising it on couch surfing, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t organize it on Facebook anymore. I’m getting the feeling that Facebook is always getting less handy. I sort of understand why people around me are using it less and less.

Anyway, today’s trail was quite flat. And I was expecting a very easy one therefore, which actually turned out to be somewhat wrong, because I made a couple of mistakes on the way and missed the path several times. I must say, the forest behind Sinsen was quite complicated, with a lot of really small and unexpected paths. Also there was no particular sign for hiking path, meaning we had to figure out ourselves where to go.

Apparently, there are a lot of horses in this area, because many of the paths we took had horse ‘lane’ parallel to it, or even every now and then there was no walking space, only for horses. It is impressive to see that they put sand just in order to make it more comfortable for horses. What a shame that it’s not easy for us to walk there.

The exhaustion of some of the people was simply too visible, even before we had reached half of the path. Alex, whom we went to a lake yesterday with, was pretty much the one who needed a break. So in the middle of the forest we decided to have a break. Later it would turn out that most of us were attacked by ticks in this moment, but at least during the break, this was not particularly clear.

The total distance was something like 16 km. It is not particularly long, but it appeared so hard to us to complete the trail (by the way, the heat wave of some weeks ago is completely gone now and it was quite comfortable today, maybe around 23 °C). Also it took quite some time and when we arrived at the train station at the end, there was not enough time remaining. There were some places where we could have ordered beer, but we decided to buy ice cream quickly and not to stay for a long time.

Along with Christmas time, summer is a special period of time here in Europe. People go for holidays, or leave for new places. The effect could be clearly seen during the hike today, as there were only 2 or 3 new people. I guess until August, we’ll have less and less people every time.

By the way today it was the 20th session. Hard to believe that it is still continuing, especially regarding the fact that we were only 4 at the first session. Hope to see it continue in the future too.

The trail can be downloaded from this link (kml-format) or this link (gpx-format)