Day 52, Wassenberg – Geilenkirchen

Weather: 🌥️🌥️☁️☁️🌧️
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪🥪 (4 out 5, 2nd breakfast at a bakery in Oberbruck and picnic lunch with the bread we brought from there)
Track: 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪 (3 out of 5, enjoyable trail along the rivers Ruhr and Worms)
Hotel: 🛌🛌🛌🛌( 4 out of 5, close to the trail, clean, spacious, good shower and good beds!)
Name of followed trail: X2/ E8
Special mention: Maaike en Martijn and their children Levi and Norah who came to visit us all the way from Veere! Great to see you guys today, thanks for coming!

Today we start along the river Ruhr, where Mark can spend his time Sporting fish, or signs about fish. There is also an educational statue of a beaver which has an audio about the beaver and it’s habitat that you can listen to when you provide electricity by turning a wheel. We go across the Ruhr and walk to the river Worms. We’ll follow this river most of the day.

After 10 km we walk past a bakery where we have 2nd breakfast and bring bread for lunch! We need to bring it, because our food bags are almost empty by now!

The river trail is easy walking mostly and gives us time to wonder about other things. Like: what kind of violent sounding sport is “faustball” (translation: fistball)?🤔🤔 We also try and find out which plant is the one producing pollen that has been making our nose runny the last few weeks? I give Mark some Elderflower to test. We blow dandelions to each other, which doesn’t really work because blowing and laughing aren’t the best combination 😅😂😂😂. Anyway , we enjoy the walk, even when we get back on grassy dykes again…

After 28 km we’re close to our hotel when Martijn calls. they got in the car this morning with their kids Levi and Norah and drove to Geilenkirchen to meet us!

We meet in front of our hotel and agree

on having dinner together after Mark and I cleaned up. I hope it wasn’t because we were that smelly, because we both felt relatively clean….

After a good shower and a short laundry session we meet again and have a great evening together in a Portuguese restaurant. Thank you Martijn and Maaike for making the effort to come over. we really enjoyed your company!