Hiking to Herkules!

I know that Kassel is a relatively small city, but I didn’t think it would disappoint me to this point: there was again only Gabriela joining me on the hike today (who’s nowhere on the photos). Luckily, two of my students joined me, so that we were 4 in total (we are indeed 4 on the group photo, but one of them didn’t hike with us).

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The tram going towards Druseltal, where we started, had to climb up a mountain at the end. It goes somewhat beyond what I thought a tram could do, but apparently here in Kassel it’s possible.

And so, it wasn’t so surprising to see a quick uphill after we left the tram stop. But the slope was quite regular, so that with a good tempo, we could achieve a good height quickly.

There was a small forest rotary on the way, from where there was one path that led to the nearby Bismarck tower. The tower itself was open and we could climb up to the top. It’s almost a wonder that there’s such a great place free of access that no one visits, while everyone goes to Herkules, which offers more or less the same view, but for money and with thousands of other tourists. Anyway in that moment we were the only one on the tower had the entire view for us.

The path until the break was relatively regular. It would have been a great hike for people on CS in Kassel, who apparently don’t really go hiking often. I still don’t understand how they could possibly miss such a great hike today. A nice place for a break, but it took quite some time for my salad to arrive, which made quite some delay in our schedule.

This was particularly deadly, since we missed the beginning of the water arts which started at 2:30pm. This being said, I actually don’t know whether I’d have wanted to be there in reality, since we could join the crowd that went along the water arts (it starts at the Herkules statue and follows the stream of water), but the size of the crowd was simply mind boggling. We might have struggled to stick together if we had been there from the beginning.

Well, this was the end of my last hike in Kassel. I must say, I could hardly imagine that the events would be this disappointing in terms of the number of participants. On the other hand, this proved one important thing: the hiking trails around Düsseldorf are not quite as disappointing as I had feared. This is because I didn’t have much experience in hiking before I started organizing these events around Düsseldorf and I always thought everywhere in Germany it’s more interesting. And as I found out around Kassel, it was not really true. So, even though in the fundament nothing really changed, I can be proud of the hiking trails around Düsseldorf in the future and continue appreciating the success we’ve been having there for quite some time now.