Kilometres walked: 33km / Total kilometres: 175 / Elevation gain: 1280m / Elevation loss: 830m / Time walked: 8h7min When my alarm vibrates at 5:30 and I remove my earplugs I hear music. Apparently the town party is still going strong. Only at 6:30, as I make my way out of the camping, the music stops playing. Bleary-eyed drunk teenagers watching the sun come up in the town square. And me, walking through, trying not…
Kilometres walked: 16km / Total distance: 141km / Elevation gain: 326m / Elevation loss: 941m / Time walked: 4h7min. The campsite up the ridge from yesterday is beautiful but I sleep poorly. First, there are lots of cows and horses around and although the sound of their bells is kind of soothing, I keep listening intently to check if they’re coming closer, too close. Irrational fears of a stampede trampling my tent with me inside…
Kilometres walked: 23 / Total distance: 125km / Elevation gain: 1134m / Elevation loss: 638m / Time walked 6h33min Every time I stretch my legs they cramp up. I know this feeling from the beginning of a marathon training cycle, and it signals an adjustment period I have to go through. I also know that this adjustment does not happen without adequate rest, do I vow to take it a bit easier from now on.…
Kilometres walked: 32 / Total distance: 102km / Elevation gain: 1600m / Elevation loss: 1244m / Time walked 8h22min I wake up at my campsite after a broken night’s sleep. It takes me way too long to break up camp and make breakfast, I clearly need to develop a routine to smoothen this process, because right now it’s an explosion of gear, cold coffee, clothes airing out, and me trying to do three things at…
Kilometres walked: 37 / Total distance: 70km / Elevation gain: 1716m / Elevation loss: 1240m / Time walked 9h39min I thought those were the lyrics of that one song, at least that’s what I’ve been humming all day, but when I looked them up it turned out they’re quite different from what I remembered. In any case, my version works perfectly as a title. Basically, it’s a list of things that hurt. My neck &…
Kilometres walked: 24,5 / Total distance: 33km / Elevation gain: 912m / Elevation loss: 908m / Time walked: 5h40 Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Mike Tyson I had a plan and nearly got punched in the face. Rather than fighting at the risk of getting punched for real I figured it was better to avoid the fight in the first place and live to see another day. My opponent?…
Nighttrain from Paris to Hendaye and walking the first kilometres of the GR11
I’m leaving tomorrow, so today is the day I’m freaking out as I try to fit all the backpacking gear for the GR11 into my tiny, tiny backpack. It’s not tiny, it’s about 40L. Not big either, but not tiny, but I swear it has shrunk. Everything fits somehow, including the first three days of food and snacks. Whether I can actually carry it…we’ll see. I haven’t weighed it yet. According to my packing list…
Of course I still have to actually walk the thing, but I figured I’d share some more information about the trail that I’ll be hiking this summer: the GR11. The Grande Randonnée 11 The GR11, or Transpirenaica, runs across the full length of the Pyrenees and stays on the Spanish side of the border, except for a few days where it crosses Andorra. There are other routes that cross the Pyrenees: the GR10 that runs…
Apparently we collectively decided the COVID-19 pandemic to be over, so that can only mean one thing…big travel plans! (aside from, you know, war in Ukraine, disastrous climate change, record-high inflation and a housing crisis we haven’t seen since….?) This blog has been dead, DEAD, since our last adventure of cycling across Japan way back in 2018. I didn’t even finish writing the series of posts about this trip so in case you wondered if…