Category: Costa Brava 2019

Day 16 consisted of one long and steady climb to the top of the Gerlitzen, a peak that we had seen ahead of us for the last few days. After a hearty breakfast, we said goodbye to our friendly Flemish hosts (and their affectionate parrot) and set off towards the foot of the Arriach valley.… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 16 to 18

Even though neither of us are particularly superstitious, after a night in room 13 at the Erlacherhaus, our 13th day on the trail turned out to be one of the worst where the weather was concerned. It was also a day when I realized I might have missed my true vocation! Light rain was falling… Continue reading Alpe-Adria trail – Days 13 to 15

And so, after a very lazy rest day with lots of good food, we returned to the trail for our tenth day. The charming manageress of the hotel sent us off with two packs of Manner wafers from Vienna that would fuel our rest stops over the next couple of days. This tenth day on… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 10 to 12

Day seven was another easy one, our shortest day, a pleasant 13-km hike from Obervellach, ending with a tough midday climb to the Danielsberg summit where a terrific reward awaited us. It was a gloriously sunny day and we began it with an easy hike up out of Obervellach until reaching the train line from… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 7 to 9

Day four on the trail was one rich in encounters. Everything began at 7 in the morning. The only other person having breakfast at the same time turned out to be French. She too was a hiker, also heading for Trieste, but following the high-mountain route from Munich. Horrifically self-centered, she didn’t listen to a… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 4 to 6

On the morning of July 23rd, 2021, after a great breakfast at the B&B where the owner’s sister told us all kinds of stories about her family of mountaineers (such as her grandfather celebrating his 80th birthday on the summit of Grossglockner with the whole family), we took the 9:30 bus from the centre of… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail – Days 1 to 3

I don’t remember how I first heard about the Alpe-Adria trail. Maybe it was a magazine article but it’s more likely that aimless surfing on the web led me to read about it. Right away, I knew I wanted to walk it. The idea of linking Austria (where my previous hiking experiences had left me… Continue reading The Alpe-Adria trail

For the last multi-day hike of 2020, before winter and a new lockdown (which would last much longer than we initially thought), I left Paris on October 23rd with my favourite travel and hiking companion, my wife Odile, to walk the Harz Witches’ Trail (the Harzer-Hexen-Stieg) in central Germany. With Halloween coming up, we felt… Continue reading The Harz Witches’ Trail

On August 25th, we took the train from Moret, near where we live, to Bourron-Marlotte, two stops along the line. From the station in Bourron, we passed through a fairly wild section of the forest, with lots of fallen trees, that made a nice change from other carefully managed areas further north. After the small… Continue reading Bourron-Marlotte to Nemours via Villiers-sous-Grez, the Dame Jouanne rocks and Larchant

A long, 19-km hike in a part of the forest that I had never seen before. A fairly difficult trail to follow as a lot of the paths are pretty overgrown, but this makes for a more adventurous atmosphere than on the other carefully maintained trails of the forest. The terrain was fairly undulating, with… Continue reading Rocher de la Combe, Mont Morillon, Rocher des Demoiselles, quarries and romance