Walking the GR5: From the North Sea to the Mediterranean

My breath is in step with my feet. Left foot, breathe in. Right foot, breathe out. Slow and steady. Head down, I see the electric blue wildflowers growing in short clusters at the side of the trail. They take my mind off the pain in my quads. Looking ahead I see the top of the col (mountain pass) 50 meters away. Head down. Left foot breathe in. Right foot breathe out. Slow and steady is the French way. Today we are walking up Col Girardin in the French Alps. We have been walking for almost three months. In that time, we have walked over 2,000 kilometers (km) and we have about 260 km left to walk before we reach Nice on the French Mediterranean.

The GR5 (Grand Randonnée or “great trek” 5) starts in Hoek van Holland (near Rotterdam) and goes through Belgium, Luxembourg, and the whole length of France on the eastern side of the country. Most people start in the north and head south because the route keeps getting better and better. Belgium and Luxembourg offer beautiful rolling farmland. Lorraine, France, offers vineyards, wheat fields, and cute Alsace villages. The Vosges and the Jura mountains in France are perfect practice for the five-week walk through the French Alps.

I’d always wanted to do an epic journey. When I was 10, I read about someone hiking the Appalachian Trail in National Geographic. I’d thought about the Pacific Crest Trail, about biking across the country, or canoeing down some major river. But the time was never right.

Choosing a trek

After selling our home of 26 years in Harvard and moving to Vermont’s Mad River Valley, my husband, Jim, and I wanted to do some extensive traveling before settling into our new community. We asked everyone we knew about his or her favorite travel adventure. One friend, who happened to be French and had traveled all over the world, suggested the GR5. He had walked the five weeks through the French Alps—the most well-known part of the GR5. I did not know at the time that this section is only one third of the entire route. I Googled “GR5” and read about a walking route from Hoek van Holland to Nice. The idea is to walk from the cold North Sea to the warm Mediterranean. I read a blog and then a few books and then another blog. I was hooked. Luckily, Jim liked the idea, too.

Kathy and Jim Elkind, formerly of Slough Road, pose in the Alps. (Courtesy photo)

As we contemplated the journey, we realized that biking the flat part, the Netherlands and the first half of Belgium, would be more fun than walking.

On April 26 we started biking. We rode for a week from Hoek Van Holland to Spa, Belgium, which would have taken about 21 days to walk. Then we started walking.

It took more than 10 days to break in our feet. Every time we felt a hot spot, we stopped and put moleskin on even though we had practiced long walks in our hiking shoes in Vermont. By the time we walked across the French border, we could walk more than 30 km in a day with no troubles.

One thing I like about the GR5 is that we slept indoors with hot showers every night. We carried very light packs. We stayed at Airbnb’s, hotels, gites (simple bed-and-breakfasts), and mountain refuges. The mountain refuges are similar to the famed White Mountain huts operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club, but better.

The joy of refuges, walking

Refuges offer dorm-style sleeping, family-style dinners, and a variety of beer and wine. When we arrived in the late afternoon, we were served blueberry or raspberry tarts with Chantilly. Dinner at 7:30 started with a vegetable soup, then some sort of meat and potatoes cooked with cheese. The third course was a cheese plate and, finally, a dessert of panna cotta, or fromage blanc (sometimes made from milk from the cows that graze right outside the refuge) with raspberry sauce. Lights went out by 9:30 p.m. Breakfast started at 7 a.m. with piping hot coffee served in bowls; bread slathered with butter and jam. Sometimes I felt that we were eating our way across Europe instead of walking.

I loved our simple life of walking. We put on the same clothes every day: blue shorts and white sun shirt. If we were in a village, we’d buy bread at the bakery; cheese and salami at the charcuterie; cucumber, apples, oranges, chocolate, and nuts at the little grocery store; fill our water containers; sling our packs on our backs and follow the white and red way markers out of town.

What would we see today? The GR5 winds its way past castles, convents, World War I and World War II bunkers and military cemeteries, abbeys, dozens of churches, museums, and even a concentration camp. We got exercise, culture, and history all in a day’s walk.

In the USA, if you want to go on a multi-day walk, usually you need to carry your tent, food, stove, and sleeping bag. In Europe, when you look at a map of walking trails, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti. There are so many different routes, and you can stay in accommodations for most of their lengths. For a while in the north of France, we met walkers on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

An absence of Americans

We met people who were walking the trail in sections. Each year they walk for two or three weeks, taking them years to walk the whole route. By the time we got to the Alps in July, we met many people who were walking the whole five-week Alps section in one shot.

Europeans are fortunate to get long holidays every year. Even so, we were anomalous in that we were walking the whole trail in one continuous stretch of time and we were Americans. We did not meet other Americans until we overlapped with the Tour de Mont Blanc route for two days.

Breathe in. Breathe out. A smile explodes on my face. I have reached the top of the col. Facing forward, I see a new set of snow-patched mountains and cols to hike in the days to come. Turning around, I face where we came from; I see the mountains we walked earlier today, yesterday, and several days before.

When we first started out, I was not sure I would ever get to the Alps. I could not think that far ahead. I had to focus on one day at a time. One hour at a time. One step at a time.

Now, it was time to extend my hiking poles and start walking down the other side of the col to the next village. We would make it one step at a time. It’s the journey (trail), not the destination. The GR5.

To hear firsthand about our journey on the GR5, come see our pictures and hear our story Dec. 1, 2018, at 5 p.m., on the third floor of the Basebox at Mad River Glen.