I Would Walk 1000 Miles

Not joining me, another walked on another walk. Gosia mentioned this in the comments and I thought I’d give it a plug. A grandmother from Canberra is going to walk circuits around the Lennox Gardens over 42 days to reach a total of 1000 miles. Her cause is a charity aimed at helping the study of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, another hugely worthwhile cause.

If you’re in Oz, then perhaps pop by and give her some support and some cash! You can also donate via her website: www.1000milewalk.org.au.

Meanwhile, I’m resting my feet at Alessandro’s, not to far away from Giuliana’s for another night, perhaps two. Giuli is off to the beach with her folks from this evening and I hope their weather improves as it’s currently chucking it down. I’ll also be looking into some routes to take over the next stage of the walk as I think the one I’d banked on may be impassable.

Another quick thanks to the folks back home as well. People, your comments do help and your encouragement makes a hell of a difference. Especially to my dad for the email last night - thanks, Pop.

Finally, please recheck the older posts when you get a chance later today or tomorrow. Hopefully, I can use Alessandro’s setup here to upload some videos to YouTube…

Nervous? Yes. Panicking? Yes. Organised? Hell, no. We just checked the post this morning and the tent which Viv kindly shipped express/very fast/urgent/should be there in 2-3 days from the UK still hasn’t arrived. According to the Royal Mail tracking system it’s "in France". Which helps. Not. The post arrives here "sometime before midday" which means it’s highly unlikely to arrive before I have to set off in the morning. Therefore I have options:

1. Buy another tent - expensive as the lightest one-person one here is almost three times the cost of the one Viv’s sent
2. Borrow Delphine’s 2-person one - this weighs three times as much as the one I’m waiting for and takes up at least twice the space in my rucksack
3. Set off without one and hope it turns up and Delphine can drive it to Sospel for me… or I end up staying at (and paying for) a Gîte for the night. And possibly many more nights after that

I’m not having a go at Viv - far from it. She’s an angel and a sweetheart. But I’ve had problems with postal services all over, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the French one’s one a par with everyone else’s! And as usual, the Law of Sod comes into account as well. The worst possible item for them to delay at the worst possible time. Oh, and the NUFC shirt I’m waiting for via ParcelForce hasn’t shown up either. Grr. Regardless. Still got a million things to do, and half a day to get through them all. Including an interview for the Evening Chronicle - will someone please get me a copy once I know what issue it’ll be in? Thanks! I just got off the phone to a nice lady at TFM who’s taken a short statement for their news as well. Hopefully the interest will raise some more cash. As far as the route goes, I will definitely have to make some changes. The roads I intended to go along are potentially too dangerous, but fortunately there are some well-mapped hiking trails which follow the same general direction. I will be using the pedometer that Sheilah got for me, so I’ll be able to calculate any shortfall in mileage as it occurs and make it up later on. 1000 miles I said, and 1000 miles I’ll do! I’ve also been making full use of the hospitality of the Couchsurfing community and have accommodation sorted in a handful of places up to and including Turin and Geneva. In fact, I have more offers than I can accept in some places! Here’s hoping this will result in a few get-togethers for some people who live near each other. I’ll try and get at least one more post up here before I set off. Wish me luck. I obviously need more of it than I anticipated!

OK, folks - time to ask a favour. I’m not after a freebie but some help getting hold of something for which I’ll pay in full. I’m after a Sony Mylo for the walk, which will help no ends in keeping me in touch with the masses (i.e. you lot). Thing is, Sony in its infinite wisdom has decided that this particular little toy will only be marketted in the US so I can’t buy one without going there or incurring insane import duty by purchasing mail order.

Is anyone going to the US in the very near future who can pick one up for me and bring it back? I’d need it sent to somewhere in France or Italy ASAP. Or is there anyone out there who works for the US Armed Forces and it based somewhere in Europe so they can get one sent in a diplomatic / military shipment thus avoiding the duty?

Let me know if you can help. As I said, I’ll pay you in full on delivery.

Another quick catchup to let people know I’m still here. A few more members of my family have kindly donated some cash to the walk, bringing the current total to $200 plus £500. Please, please go to the How To Donate page and add to the total. Over the last few days I have been in Poland. Thanks to a good friend (and ex work colleague), I have been tramping around some lovely mountains and definitely broken my boots in. Thank you, Gosia! I have calluses where I’d normally blister, which is a good sign! I reckon we walked around 9 miles on Saturday, a lot of it along some very dodgy broken up stones, taking around four hours if you knock out the stops and photo breaks. Given that a lot of this was up some very steep hills, this is a good speed. Distances measured with the pedometer kindly supplied by Sheilah. I’ll be mainly plodding around cities for the next week or so before hitting the south of France. I expect to be doing a lot of hiking with Delphine while I’m there, which should also be good preparation.

I will start the walk on AUGUST 1ST.

I had to decide sometime on a firm start date otherwise I’d just keep wandering around Europe until the depths of winter. So rather than the previously vague “late mid-late July”, I’ve settled on the 1st of August to start my trudge from Monte Carlo.

Just to let you all know I’m still working on things behind the scenes! Still no reply to any letters sent by my folks recently, but I may follow those up with phone calls in the next week or so if I have broadband (and therefore Skype) on my laptop.

I’ve had quite a few people get in touch with me via CouchSurfing.com, which is cool. A couple of offers of accommodation - though not on the path of the walk as yet - and three offers of company for some of the stretches, which I will likely take up. As well as being someone to talk to, and a safety net in case of accidents, they can also vouch that I don’t cheat!

I was looking through the Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring book in a shop over the last few days (I won’t mention the name of the shop as it’s not the wonderful Dymocks), but after working out the price after the stickered 20% discount I figured it was barely cheaper than the UK cover price. I may as well look for it second hand or buy one off the shelf back home so I don’t have to lug it around Asia and the Middle East for the next 6 weeks.

Unless someone fancies donating a copy…?

Update: I notice Amazon are doing it for a shade over a tenner, and I have £20 in vouchers to use up. Methinks that will be the best route!

The whole shebang. It will change, I’m sure, but only in response to advice, offers of accommodation and my aching feet once the walk starts.

I’ve worked on the assumption I can clear 15-18 miles each day. I may be able to do more, I might struggle to manage that much on other days. As such, the “day” count is very approximate.

The grand total, according to the RAC Routeplanner is 1031 miles, and I estimate 68 days of walking (plus rest/touristy days). This is based on 15-18 miles a day, though I still reckon I can do more than that. Shielah is going to try and get a pedometer to me so hopefully I can work out fairly accurately mow many miles I actually do.

As before, if you spot somewhere you know on the route plan because - say - you live there, then a bed for the night would be hugely appreciated!

Hopefully by Tuesday coming I will have a fairly well-planned route on the site for you to peruse. Updates to the existing information include the fact that I’ll likely be starting in Monaco which adds another country/principality/whatever to the list and that I’ll be diverting slightly from the most direct route to take in some nice places.

These include Gelsenkirchen in Germany, which is a twin city of Newcastle. I was considering aiming for as many twin cities as I could, but Bergen and Groningen are simply too far out of the way. However, I’m hoping to go to Haifa as part of my visit to Israel on the way back to Europe. I just found out that it, too, is a twin city of Newcastle!

As things stand, I have an approximate total of 952 miles so far, so I need to add a couple of detours. A shame I don’t think I can cross any more countries without adding far more than that. For the record, I’ve been using the RAC Route Planner to calculate distances as well as the AA road atlas from Dymocks. There’s been one point where the route I’d pencilled and the one on the RAC site didn’t agree, but combining the two has been very useful.

Tomorrow, I’m intending to spend some time buried in Lonely Planet guides in a bookshop in Brisbane working out what I can do in lots of these towns I’ve never heard of!

OK, I’ve added a whole two new pages and updated the template of this blog a bit. Please help publicise the event and the web site. As well as posters, there are now also icons you can pop on your own blog, or in the signature you use on forums. Just link it to this page, please! Finally, I’ve plotted a basic route. It needs tweaked and made more precise, stops need to be calculated and so on, but it’s a start and it’s available from the route page.

In spare moments over the last week or so I’ve been looking at the route for the walk and plugging it to everyone I’ve met. Today, though, I managed to catch up with Mike who founded Blue Dragon, the charity which will benefit from the trek.

He happened to be in Sydney doing some fundraising so I stayed on an extra night to make sure I could catch up with him.

I also got chatting to a Swiss guy in my dorm last night. He gave me some pointers on the tunnels, hills and roads in Switzerland - I can’t walk through the tunnels but many of them have very nice, and direct, hiking tracks over the top. Others, however, just have long winding roads!

To make things easier, I’ve also decided to relax my "1000 mile" rule slightly. Without accurate route-planning software or an expensive set of cartographic equipment and highly detailed roadmaps there’s always going to be a margin for error in the distance travelled. Inevitably, there’ll be road closures or I’ll find somewhere I’d planned to walk across being impassable to foot traffic.

Instead, the rule will be changed so that I walk at least 1000 miles, but still as close to that amount as possible. Use of transport (with the exception of the ferry) is still forbidden.

My rough route at present can be viewed easily on a European map. To include as many countries as possible, I’ll start in North Italy. This is also handy as I want to travel Italy for a week or two sightseeing before I begin!

I’ll begin very close to the Swiss/French borders so there won’t be much of Italy in there but it will count. Starting around the Tunnel Du Grand-St-Bernard, draw a line straight up from there to Metz in France. I’ll have to skip around the Lac de Neuch&acarat;tel, probably to the east, but otherwise it’s a straight-ish line. From Metz, north into Luxembourg and out of the top of that country into Belgium. I’ll then vear slightly north-east in a Dusseldorf direction so that I enter Germany. From there, as straight a line as I can to Amsterdam and then Ijmuiden for the ferry.

A friend has said she can get a pedometer to me (thank you Sheilah!) so I can keep track of how far I’ve actually walked day by day. If anyone wants to take that route and shove it through Autoroute or similar (and ensure that no tunnels, autobahns, motorways, etc are included on the route), I’d be interested to see how close to 1000 miles it comes.

Again, I would like to thank Dymocks of Australia for the AA Road Map of Europe which I’m using to plan the route. It’s making life easier when I show it to the Europeans in the hostels who can then tell me what the roads are like!

Finally for today - posters! Please feel free to download and distribute. I’ll try and get permanent links to these on the sidebar shortly. In the meantime, download them from these links:

• MS Word / OpenOffice Document
• Adobe Acrobat (PDF)

Note that the posters mention that some organisations (say, a person in the office or reception at your business) could collect money on my behalf. If you intend to do this, please contact me first so that if anyone asks, I can confirm you’re kosher!