Hiking to Hermannsdenkmal at Detmold!

I’ve been saying it is flat in the north of North Rhine-Westphalia. But if you look at a larger picture, actually there’s a mountain range going from Osnabrück to Hagen, which is then directly connected to Sauerland. I know it’s not very famous, but this is actually an interesting area. So far, we have visited it once, when we went to the Externsteine. This time, since I was in Kassel in the morning, it was a great opportunity to go there, especially to visit the Hermannsdenkmal at Detmold.

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Since the number of people signing up for the event was anyway relatively small all the time, I presume most of the people understood correctly that it was not within the VRR area, or at least the train journey to Detmold would take more than 3 hours. Still, there were some of them who realised it when they reached Hamm, which was actually already outside VRR. It’s good that there was no inspection until that moment… As for me, it took less than 2 hours from Kassel, which is actually still fairly long, though.

The real hiking part was maybe the middle one third. The rest was more or less a question of how to get there. It was somewhat funny to see people trying to follow the quasi-random route that I created to get there. It was partly just bush and it looked more like we made our own path out of it.

I don’t know how important this is, but according to what I learned from Viola, this is a trap for mosquitoes. In particular, the ball supposedly look like the ass of a horse, so that the mosquitoes try to land on it, and they end up being trapped inside the cylinder above. No idea how it exactly works.

The part going up to Hermannsdenkmal offered a great view over Detmold (and obviously I forgot to take a photo, except for the one that you can see above where the background is theoretically the view over Detmold). Somewhat reminiscent of Gevelsberg, but the surrounding nature looked indeed still somewhat different. Well, not that I know whether “it was different” was a sufficient reason to be on a train for more than 3 hours…

When we made the last turn to Hermannsdenkmal, it became all of a sudden extremely touristic. Obviously, people go to the nearest parking area by car (which is just around the corner) and take instagram photos right in front of it. We might have been the weirdos hiking all the way to the monument.

Appropriately enough for such a touristic site, there were at least one restaurant and one café there. If I’m entirely German, I probably should have ordered beer (which everyone else was obviously doing). I had a salad, for a quite reasonable price for such a place.

From Hermannsdenkmal, we essentially went straight to reach the train station. It didn’t take even one minute to leave this crowd of people and we were all alone in the nature, although the last part going along a small canal was a lovely place obviously frequented by a lot of people. Detmold turned out to be a beautiful city, especially around this famous music academy. We might come back at some point in the near future since there’s also one youth hostel there.