I usually hike together with my wife and our little dog.
We love walking coastlines, which is why we completed the South West Coast Path, the UK’s longest National Trail, from Minehead in Somerset all the way around Land’s End and along the south coast to Poole in Dorset.
With Brexit, we paused our hiking projects in the UK, although maybe one day we’ll return to finish the few kilometres still missing.
After that, we moved to the other side of the Channel and completed the GR 34 Sentier des Douaniers, following the French coast from Mont Saint-Michel to Saint-Nazaire.
Our current project is the GR 223 Sentier Littoral de la Normandie, continuing along Normandy’s coastline. These days our little dog is getting older and often rides in a backpack, so some stages are shorter and adapted to his pace.
If you’d like to use our tours, here is some advice.
We are not ambitious enough to carry all our belongings along the trail, so we developed our own system. We travel with two cars, always leaving one car for the night. That means our tours usually move forward day by day while we walk “backwards”. We leave one car at the end of a stage, drive with the second car further along the route, and then walk back to the first. Afterwards we return to our overnight stay and repeat the process for the next stage.
We are not big fans of road walking, so we avoid it whenever possible when planning our tours. If the official trail follows a drivable road for a while, we often skip that section and adjust the car logistics instead. Start and finish points are usually places where you can park legally, sometimes in spots that are easier to reach with a four-wheel drive.
Our little dog is part of every trip, but as he gets older, some stages are now a bit shorter and a bit more flexible than they used to be.
If you use our tours, I’d be happy about some feedback or a like.
Cheers,
Frank