Tuesday 17 June 2008 - A Sense of Panic

This time next week we will be in France, preparing to dip our toes in the Med before strolling around the Alps for a while.

We haven’t really prepared for this (in fact it has only one mention on this blog – on 28 October last year!).

I’ve bought a few maps, and we have a bit of backpacking kit left over from the TGO Challenge.

A selection of windshields for the stove has today been ordered from Bob and Rose.
Why do we seem to go through these like hot cakes?
Is that all we need from Bob and Rose?
How windy will it really be?

Between now and next Tuesday I’ll try to get more organised, and broadcast a more detailed plan of our route so that anyone interested can follow our progress.

My original idea was to follow the ‘Grande Traversata Delle Alpi’ (GTA) route that is covered in 47 stages in a Cicerone guide written by Gillian Price.
The more I look at that route, the more it seems rather ‘soft’. So in an effort to achieve something a little more challenging, we will try to keep close to the French/Italian, and later the Swiss/Italian borders, staying in Italy most of the time.

That has involved buying a fresh set of maps to cover the north west corner of Italy – parts not reached by the GTA, such as the enticing Gran Paradiso region.

In an effort to show you where we are going, I logged onto Google Maps for the first time tonight. It was really quite useful, though I didn’t get to grips with any significant features, and I was unable to show a scale on the screen dump that I have utilised for today’s postcard.
But the image I’ve quite easily finished up with does show our planned start and finish points, and Google has placed a convenient yellow line to mark the Italian borders that will form the basis of our route.

The distance between our start and finish points is probably about 200-250 kilometres as the crow flies, but our walking route may tot up to double that length.

Well, that’s a start, anyway, and given that there is no natural fixed end point we can build in quite a few rest days and make visits to local towns where practicable. The route will be ‘pure’ (an unbroken line), but side trips will be permitted!

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