Hiking report

Weekend trip to Gotha

After the weekend trip to Porto, I was actually not so motivated to organize another one. Yet, since I had already organized an apartment in Gotha and announced it to everyone, I asked them first whether they were still interested to join. Out of 10 people who were there, 8 were still interested. One thing I really hate in life is to be unreliable.

Out of the 8 people, 4 of them travelled to Gotha by car, because Rohith recently got a car. Kartik and Cláudia went there on their own, because they were landing in Nuremberg by plane after their trip to Greece. I was on my own and went there by train. As the Deutschland ticket, which allows us to travel everywhere in Germany on local trains, was introduced this month, I was expecting at least one person to use it. In reality no one did it.

There’s one thing that was going to make this trip a bit more complicated: I decided to combine two vacations, and go to Greece from Gotha afterwards. So I was carrying all sorts of stuff that I didn’t need in Gotha. I put everything in my backpack and another bag, then this bag was mounted on my foldable bicycle that I finally bought recently.

This foldable bike allowed me to go from the train station to the apartment, although it was also not really necessary either, because the city of Gotha was fairly small, and I could go pretty much everywhere on foot. On the other hand, we can also say the apartment was really well situated, right between the train station and the city center.

Since I got so much time before everyone else was arriving, I went to the city center. I didn’t check anything before going there, but it turned out there was a festival going on for the entire weekend. The city itself is fairly small, but the festival was taking place in the whole city, so it was quite a decent size. As it started raining at some point, I went back to the apartment. On the way, I went to the supermarket to get food for the weekend. In the meantime, the car group arrived.

I totally forgot to take photos in the apartment, but just like always, it was a really comfortable one. There were exactly 10 beds, so we could have had 2 more people comfortably. It’s really a pity that no one else wanted to join.

Usually on weekend trips, we prepare pasta and salad, but this time I decided to make pizzas, because there was an oven, and because pasta can be eaten only at home, while pizza can be taken to the hike. I guess this idea itself was good, the only problem was that the ready-to-use dough was horribly inadequate for pizza. Next time I’ll make it myself.

We got only one bottle of wine for the evening. But in the end since hardly anyone drank, it was enough for us. We went to bed before midnight, but that’s normal on the Friday of weekend trips.

Day II (May 6, Saturday):

Gotha lies in a flat area, but there are hilly areas nearby, and I managed to make a decent one in a place that could be reached by the tram from Gotha (although I didn’t know that there was a tram). Since it looked like a nice path, I went there by bicycle. Some of the others went there by car and the others by tram. It was actually nice that Rohith had a car, because I could store my bicycle there.

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The track was partially made with Komoot this time. I did it also in Porto, but this time I checked the quality myself, in order to not make the same mistake. It looked fantastic.

Right after we left Friedrichroda, which was the tram stop, we entered this beautiful garden. Frankly I don’t understand who maintains it for what reasons, but it was there and it was a nice way to start the hike.

The area is only somewhat hilly, but also there was no difficult place on the way. There was even a swing along the way. No idea who put it there for what purpose, because it was hardly accessible and looked super dangerous.

There were some viewpoints every now and then. I was already seeing them when I was planning the track with open street maps, but Komoot this time helped me a lot with locating those places. It felt like we were going from one nice view to another all the time.

This time, we didn’t have a proper place for a break. We simply stopped every now and then, eating the horrible pizza from the previous day.

As the cycle way from Gotha to Friedrichroda was so nice, I took my bicycle again and went back to Gotha. Anyway I would have had to wait for the others for the shower, so what’s the point of going back home early.

Then we went to the city center, to enjoy the festival in the evening. While I wanted to stay in the festival all the time, the others decided to go to a Greek restaurant. Obviously it made no sense for me at all, on top of the fact that there was a festival going on, because I was on the way to Greece!

Anyway I stayed in the city center. There was even a band playing decent music, which is extremely rare in Germany, because music is one horribly weak point of Germans, and as soon as a band starts playing I usually only want to run away as quickly as possible.

At some point the others joined me and we stayed there for some time, until relatively late in the evening. We continued drinking a little bit at home, but there were almost only Kartik and I drinking. Since I was going to have a long trip, I decided to not drink too much, and then the last unopened bottle went with Saki.

Day III (May 7, Sunday):

The whole reason why I organized a trip to Gotha was because Saki wanted to go to the water falls near Eisenach. I decided to put it on Sunday, because my train to Basel (which would eventually lead me to Greece) was anyway going over Eisenach. Initially the hike was 17 km, but after I saw how exhausted Rohith was, I decided to make it a lot shorter. In the end it was something like 10 km. Good enough for a short hike.

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Eisenach is yet another beautiful city. It’s really a pity that in West Germany most of the historical cities were destroyed during the war. Here you can still see the middle European atmosphere everywhere.

The hike went through forests all the time. On weekend trips the Sunday hike tends to be short and super easy, and this one was a good example. I found it really comfortable to be there.

There was hardly anyone on the way, but when we reached the water falls, we could see a large number of tourists at once. Well, the waterfalls were actually indeed quite impressive, and they also made a good installation to enjoy it more.

We then got back to Eisenach. First Kartik and Cláudia left on ICE. The rest of us went to an Arabic restaurant. I was the last one to leave Eisenach.

This is so much for the trip to Gotha. Before we went there, I claimed a few times that it was going to be the last one. However, I have to say after having done this one, I started to feel we should more of them. Not the kind of complicated trips, but maybe in the nearby cities. Fortunately, there are more people now doing similar things, like Felipe or Rohith, so I don’t have to organize everything myself. Well, let’s where the whole thing is going to go.

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