Activity level: Easy.
Christmas is over and it’s nearly the new year. I’m writing this sat in the kitchen of my in-laws after another excellent Christmas and a nice batch of creative walks with my wife in Rodgau’s City Forest.
I love this forest. It’s a stone’s throw away from where my wife grew up and it is the place where, exactly a year ago, I came up with the idea of taking people on long creative walks. It’s an incredibly varied forest that’s large enough to get lost in: you can walk for hours without seeing anyone and yet it’s small enough to walk back to civilisation should you need to.
There’s a lovely mix of cultivated and wild, private sections of forest that give wild boar enough cover for breeding that they’ve become a bit of a pest. If you’re lucky and very quiet you’ll spot them hunting for worms and acorns.
Woodpeckers and Jays, Buzzards and Great Tits offer the musical backdrop for the walks and large sections of the forest are covered in beautiful green moss and heather. It’s a wonderful place.
What makes this and many other forests like it a great place for a spot of creative walking is that the terrain is easy going: it’s very flat so there’s no need to worry about getting up a mountain. This means that you can fully concentrate on the project you’ve taken with you to work on. I work on my own ideas here and it’s possible to do walks of 8, 16 or 25 kilometers which makes it the perfect place to work on small, medium or large projects/ideas/problems.
I jokingly call this forest my “Rodgau Office” and as I’ve started getting requests from other parts of the country for walks so I’ve decided to include this forest as one of my bookable routes.
So if you’re in the Frankfurt area and can’t manage a day in the Bavarian Alps you can now book me for a walk in southern Hessen.