RobertO

We are currently spending our vacation in Bad Birnbach, a rural place in southern Lower Bavaria between the Danube, Rott and Inn, in the middle of the beautiful Rottal hills. Today's tour was a small round of exploration in the surrounding area. Beautiful sections of forest alternated with great wildflower meadows and fields. The highlight of the tour is a wooden chapel in the middle of the forest. The chapel was built at the beginning of the 18th century and, according to tradition, is said to radiate a special energy.

Today's tour was almost a home game. Very close to where I lived I went across the Cologne green belt to the Lindenthal canals (Clarenbach and Rautenbach canals). The two channels form the connection between the interior and exterior of Cologne's green belt and were created in the mid-1920s. With the stone sculptures and the arched bridges, the two channels also seem a bit out of date, of course in a positive sense. The canal system is now a local recreation area for the people of Cologne and also offers plants and water birds such as mallards and swans a pleasant habitat with their young.According to tradition, Düsseldorf also played an important role for the planners around Cologne's mayor Konrad Adenauer. Or rather the moats on the Königsallee. In any case, a comparison of the urban planner at that time has survived, in which he said:
"The entire almost 600 meter long system has approximately the same width dimensions as the Königsallee in Düsseldorf" 😉

The tour could also be described as a "journey through time through the Northern Eifel". The start is at the Kartstein rock with the Kakushöhle near Eiserfey. Archaeological finds go back to more than 300,000 years of human history. The tour follows the Roman Canal hiking trail. The Roman art of engineering is still impressive today, the water pipe from the Eifel to Cologne was conceived as a pure slope pipe. The available height differences, the energy level, had to be used very sparingly. Not so easy when you consider which obstacles had to be overcome.
The tour was very varied and leads through beautiful nature, with many sections of forest, fields and wildflower meadows with many butterflies. The place Eiserfey, near the Kakushöhle, is certainly worth another visit.

After hiking the first section from Kreuzau to Nideggen evenings at the end of May, I had planned the rest of the route to the Urft dam wall for today. The Buntsandstein route runs a total of 40 km, which I divided into two stages. The first section was very spectacular, with the bizarre colored sandstone cliffs and the fantastic viewpoints. The second part does not have these special highlights, but it also offers a very beautiful nature, for the first time the edge of the Eifel National Park is touched between evenings and houses. At the beginning the route runs along the Rur, from the river a pleasant coolness rises with the current summer temperatures. There are intersections with the Rur again and again up to the first kilometers. From Heimbach, the smallest town in North Rhine-Westphalia according to Eilel Tourism, it continues along forest paths towards the Urft dam. Then we went back with the Rursee shipping, also in two stages, first to Rurberg and then on to Schwammenauel (Heimbach). Not least because of the beautiful shipping, it was a very eventful tour - actually like a day's vacation.

The place "Hengasch" in the Liebernich district in the Eifel is of course not to be found on any map. Rather, it is a screenplay village from the cult crime film “Murder with a View”. Who doesn't know it, between 2008 - 2014 a total of 39 episodes were shot in 3 seasons. Behind the town of Hengasch is the Eifel town of Kallmuth. At least various outside shots and the sets were filmed around the police station, where actually community center is located. In addition, there are other filming locations in NRW, the inn "Aubach" (legendary mayor election) is e.g. can be found in the Bergisches Land near Kürten. So there would be opportunities to continue the filming hike.
Personally, I find it a shame that no new episodes were filmed. However, the series is currently being repeated in the third (WDR) and all seasons are also set on Netflix.The template for this hike is a tipple tour from Cologne's Stadt-Anzeiger by Peter Squentz from 2015. The route is quite nice even without "Hengasch", many paths along wild flower meadows and fields, but also some forest sections. If someone is interested in the tour description or would like to hike completely "old school" without GPS, I would like to add the link to the tipple tour in the appendix.mobil.ksta.de/freizeit/--mord-mit-aussicht--tippeltour-wanderung-zum-bilderbuchdorf---hengasch--1021272?originalReferrer=

Apparently you are specialists for the Ville, wanted and found, right !? I'm glad! Nice tour!

Only two pictures or are there still some?Edit: I was probably a little too fast
What I see now looks great. 👍📸🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

In exceptional cases, the day can start before the first coffee: Greetsiel> Pilsum run