A weekend in Wuppertal, Germany

After seeing a bunch of family/travel vloggers with kids, I got the urge to just go travel as well.

We're not really that kind of family, but we do have those intentions and as I was casually browsing Google Maps with terrain layer on, I saw Wuppertal (and know they have a suspension railway) and time-wise it's also a 2 hour drive.

This was the perfect destination for a weekend trip. Something hilly for me, something not-too-far for our 2yo and something outside of the Netherlands and involving trains for my 7yo.

Wuppertal

We spent the nights in an appartment in Barmen, which is one of the districts of Wuppertal. It also has the endstation for the suspension railway, so that was a nice bonus. Barmen itself is quite industrious, not super tourist friendly, but not bad whatsoever. The appartment was fine, classic case of you get what you pay for.

The strange thing is that there's quite a bit of filth and decay, which might be common for a poorer neighbourhood, but this was also the case in the city center. On the other hand the council is building and maintaining a lot of playgrounds and parks, so it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Another thing that I was not prepared for was that certain streets were really steep, like San Francisco steep. I had no idea they had those.

Activities

We arrived Friday and just had dinner and went to bed. Our plan was to get Schwebebahn tickets on Saturday and use it to go to the city center and maybe stop along the way.

But with kids you never know and so we only went to the city center and back again.

But not before we stopped at Cinnamood (a cinnamon bun place with a lot of vegan options). 😋

After arriving back 'home' we took some rest and decided to go to Toelleturm by car. Toelleturm is an observation tower on the south side of the valley, there's a nice big playground next to it. We played there for about an hour and then went up the tower. We saw that it would open at 15:00 on Saturdays, however after 10 minutes of waiting we figured it would not happen today.

Time for Plan B! We crossed the city and went to 'Nordpark', speciffically the 'Skywalk' bridge. It's a vantage point over the valley and the city, it's quite nice and the kids loved it.

Getting there was a bit more difficult, the 'official' (maybe?) gate and parking places where completely full, and also only accessible by a super narrow 2-way road. There's also a sports park on that same road. Not sure why the council is not trying something better for that.

In the end we drove back and found a place on the road, which was actually closer to the Skywalk, but did require us to walk a very steep foot path. 😰