Trips

Activities between Christmas holidays and New Year

Hike on the Luther Trail

It was already clear that the next holiday in February/March should be the Portuguese Way of St. James. This could practically only be prevented by new corona restrictions or by the fact that hostels are simply closed in the winter season – but both turned out to be negative. Since we would be traveling exclusively within Europe (similar to the Scandinavia trip), we would not have any problems with longer flights, visas, the Internet or other hurdles. But one question remained: Are we even prepared to hike 20 km or more every day? With Nathalie, you could certainly answer this with a clear “yes”, since she has often covered such distances or even longer ones in one day (by running or hiking). But she has never done this for so many days in a row. For me, as a couch potato, things are very different when it comes to fitness. That’s why Sunday should serve as a field test of how well I would survive a 15+ kilometer hike by walking a stage of the Luther Trail from Weimar to Apolda.

For the hike itself we only took light backpacks with us, which Nathalie filled with bento boxes and something to drink. The weather was actually very pleasant at around 15°C, so that you didn’t sweat much and didn’t burn in the sun. This was similar to the weather in Portugal and Spain in February/March. Not much can be said about the hike itself. We saw many farms, goats, ducks and old playgrounds. A highlight for us was something we saw on the side of the trail: A very long pile of sugar beets. At first we didn’t even know what kind of turnips they were and why they were lying so unprotected for almost 100 meters in a long big pile on the side. After some research, however, we found out that this is quite normal at this time of year and the harvest is usually thrown into a heap like this. Since Nathalie is such a vegetable fan, she also took a beet with her (but pssst, don’t tell anyone).

Shortly before we arrived in Apolda, the path seemed more and more familiar to us, since we had already cycled to Apolda and back some time ago. So we walked through the park (Herressen Promenade) until we got to the city center. Since it was Sunday, there wasn’t much going on here either, so we just kept walking to the other end of town, where the train station is. It was clear from the start that we would take the train back, as a hike of more than 30 km would probably be too much. We had to wait for the train for almost half an hour at the train station, but this was a good time to analyze whether we were prepared for the Camino de Santiago. In fact, my feet hardly hurt, which was probably due to my well-worn hiking boots – which had already survived Peru, Japan, South Africa and Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the feeling was unstable, because of course we didn’t have full hiking backpacks with us and the load can also increase over several days. But we’d rather tell that in the next travel report.

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