Weather: ☀️☀️☀️🌤️🌤️
Lunch: 🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞 (5 out 5, great pancakes at the Duivelsberg with my parents)
Track: 🇳🇱🇳🇱🇳🇱🇩🇪 (4 out of 5, lovely forest and change scenery with hills and villages)
Milestone: Netherlands ✅
Hotel: 🛌🛌🛌 (3 out 5, simple appartment with proper amenities, including a washing machine 😁)
Name of followed trail: Grote rivierenpad (great rivers trail)
Special mention: It’s Koningsdag! Celebrated with an ‘oranjebittertje’ and the church bells in Kleve (Germany) played the Wilhelmus (our national anthem, not theirs).
After a good breakfast, Niels brings us back to where we left the trail yesterday. We leave Nijmegen through the rolling hills of this area. We walk a lot of small ups and downs in the Dutch hillside today, it feels like the country is giving us a warming up for the hills that are yet to come 😄😅. We get into the forest of the Sterrenberg and Duivelsberg, beautiful forests, yet sometimes quite sweaty on this warm springs morning 🥵! We see a pole that marks the border between the Netherlands and Germany. We are getting close to finishing the Dutch part of the trail! On the sign on the pole is written: Let friendship unite (heal) what borders devide. A wise thing to say.
After 9 km we get to our lunchspot, the pancake restaurant at the Duivelsberg! We are meeting my parents here, before we walk out of the Netherlands.
We get an Oranjebittertje (national drink for holidays like this one) with our coffee and make a toast to our king. We enjoy each other’s company, and the really good pancakes.
We say goodbye to my parents, and hike into Germany. Our 4th country to cross on our journey. This happens rather suddenly, without any warning or signs. All steetnames and traffic plates are in German, so we must have crossed it at the pole… No passport check needed here, so we continue into our next country! A new language to use, time to practice our German chitchat! This leads to us speaking very bad German to each other (or more specifically Dutch transferred to Germanified). We hope to learn how to have conversations in more understandable German in the next couple of months, because we’ll be hiking Germany for 2 months and then Austria for a month, so 3 months of German speaking countries in total. After that, we’ll have to go with sign language, because my Slovakian, is non-existent as is my knowledge of the language in the other countries that we will walk through.
Getting into Germany also means a change in route markers. The Grote Rivierenpad ends
in Kleve, so we still follow the white/red markers, but specific E8 markers also start to appear! We’ve seen a few in the Netherlands, but now they are a lot more frequent, even mentioning where the trail goes beyond Germany!
We enjoy hiking the German forest roads. It is beautiful here and so much space to camp! I’m looking forward to our zeroday in an appartment in Kleve, but also definitely look forward to camping in these woods!
Only 1,5 km before our destination we get out of the forest, almost in the city centre! We pass an outdoor everything shop (I honestly don’t think they ever sell no there) for a gass canister. Our most difficult resupply item done✅!
We get to our appartment and do some groceries, so we can sta home tonight. I’m really tired and my feet hurt after another 30+ km day. Happy and going strong, but in need of a zero day!
At the border there is a borderstone about 10 m to your right.
Did you know that the whole system of E-walks was the initiative of a chairman from a German walking community? That’s why you’ll come across a lot of E8 signs in Germany.