Day 47, Mariënbaum – Alpen

Weather: ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️ (hiker suitable 100%, best hiking weather one can wish for! Sunny yet not to hot, with a light breeze)
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪🥪 (4 out 5, bread from the bakery under the windmill and strawberries from the market on a bench)
Track: 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪 (3 out of 5, nice trail through forest and farmland, yet a couple of long straight stretches. Xanten city centre and Bitten were both beautiful medival (some parts even Roman) cities)
Route markings and GPX: (👍👍👍🤞 3 out of 5 thumbs up, because it was a lot better than yesterday. The Komoot file aligned with the markers almost everywhere! Fingers crossed because I hope this means we have found a working system for our time in Germany))
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺ (3 out 5, a nice and quiet spot in the forest)
Name of followed trail: X2/ E8

Nobody came to send us away, and we both slept really well, so the campsite next to the path wasn’t that bad after all 😅.

We start with a walk through the forest today, and continue through the fields and farmland on an old railway line. The railway line was once part of a long international line that connected London to Berlin and at Petersburg! We also spot a few strange and scary looking artworks at a dental lab, and (less scary) signs of the Jerusalem way on which the peace walk will follow us into Xanten in a few days/weeks time.

The railway line takes us into the medival town Xanten, with old gates and houses. A beautiful small city, that once was the 2nd largest city in the northern part of the Roman empire.

In the town we go to a bakery under a windmill (would have been great for our Dutch bingo, but apparently they have them in Germany too). We get some bread for 2nd breakfast+ for lunch, to bring along. At the market they sell fresh strawberries! We bring these also for lunch! We also spot our first Maibaum (may tree). Hopefully we’ll see more of this tomorrow.

We continue our walk out of Xanten and meet a lady who recognized us as fellow hikers. We have a chat about our hike and get the via Fangenica as a suggestion for a new project. We’ll first finish this one though 😅.

We walk through the lovely town of Birten and get into farmland again. From here the trail becomes a bit boring with long straight stretches of tarmac. Luckily there is enough to see around us most of the time. The farmers are getting the hay in, the flowers bloom and the horses and foals are running through the grassy meadows. It’s spring at its best again today!

We have a good late lunch with all the brought goodies at a branch. Another proper picnic!

After that we have one more nice long break before we hike into the forest again towards to our campsite near Alpen.

Just before the forest we get some water from a nice lady, thank you again!

We find a nice campspot, a bit further from the path this time 😁. We make a 3 course dinner, laugenbrötchen with black forest ham, couscous and de. Oetker Paradies crème for dessert. We’ll be having that dessert more often! Finally we found a good hiker-dessert again!