Solvitur Ambulando

Our plans have changed significantly since my last email, so I wanted
to let everyone know what’s happening. Instead of pursuing
conventional employment and settling down in Fort Collins, we’ve
decided to follow Melissa’s passion for organic vegetable farming. Our
search for farm work has landed us in Petaluma, about 45 minutes north
of San Francisco.

I was apprehensive at first about the prospect of manual labor, but
I’ve found that I really enjoy working outside and being able to work
together with Melissa. And there’s a lot more to working on this farm
than just field labor, as we have a stand at local farmers’ markets
and make deliveries to upscale restaurants in San Francisco that use
our vegetables.

There should be work for us here until mid-February, at which time
we’ll probably move on to another farm. We’re not sure yet how much
money we’ll be able to save, so we haven’t made any concrete plans
about travel and adventure for next summer.

In other news, we visited nearly a dozen national parks, monuments,
and recreation areas on the drive out to California. We managed to get
a hike or two in each day, and stayed at a developed campground within
the park each night. The places we enjoyed most were the five national
parks in Utah and the Grand Canyon, a tour sometimes referred to as
the Grand Circle:

http://eric.trailfaqs.com/photos/grand_circle/

Enjoy the photos, and wish me luck with my new line of work!

Melissa and I got snowed off the Colorado Trail on Friday, about 200 miles into our hike. We were adequately prepared for the weather, but walking through a foot or more of snow was impossibly slow; it was decided that we wouldn’t have enough food to make it to Salida, our next resupply stop, so we retreated to lower elevations as quickly as possible.

We could’ve waited around for the snow to melt, or improvised a lower-level route like many Continental Divide Trail hikers are doing (the two trails are roughly the same through much of Colorado), but we decided we’d had enough. The prospect of hitchhiking from Salida all the way back to Denver on Saturday was daunting, but we were incredibly lucky and managed it with just two hitches.

So we picked up the Jeep from storage and stopped at a Starbucks to browse Craigslist for housing opportunities…by Sunday morning, we’d settled in at our new housesitting gig on the north side of Fort Collins. The transition from hiking to everyday life has been incredibly jarring, but we’re already looking for jobs and trying to ease back toward normalcy.

Anyway, here are our pictures:

http://eric.trailfaqs.com/photos/ct/

We had camera problems early on, when we got caught in an intense thunderstorm, but everything seemed to work once the camera dried out except the LCD screen, which remains very dim. Still, we took some very nice photos that we’re both proud of.

So this ends our adventuring, at least for now. If you’d like to stay abreast of what we’re up to, I’ll be posting infrequently to my journal.

My apologies for such a long delay in writing. Melissa and I had a
great time on our bicycle tour of the northern Netherlands…see our
photos here:

http://eric.trailfaqs.com/photos/europe/netherlands/

After a whirlwind tour of the traditional kolsch and altbier brewpubs
in Cologne and Dusseldorf, an evening in a cozy London pub drinking
real ale and playing Scrabble, and a crazy day of travel involving
ridiculous security at Heathrow and a missed connection in Montreal,
we finally arrived back in the States. I spent the next few days
visiting the Lake Erie Islands and Cedar Point with my friends Cory
and Chris, then the next few weeks at my father’s place in Indiana
looking for a used Jeep Cherokee. After spending countless hours
online, making numerous phone calls, and crisscrossing the state to
actually look at the vehicles, we finally found one that was suitable.

The car search took much longer than we thought, but we hoped that
we’d still be able to drive out to Colorado in time and hike the
Colorado Trail before winter set in. So we loaded up our new Jeep and
headed west at 75 miles an hour, spending a night near Kansas City
with our hiking friend Chino on the way to Denver. We arrived early in
the afternoon, made a quick trip to the library to make photocopies
from the CT guidebook, put the Jeep into storage, had a nice dinner,
bought a short story anthology to read on the trail, and then took an
overnight bus to Durango.

The trail has been amazing so far, but it’s been surprisingly cold and
windy. Most hikers start in Denver to ease their way into the hike,
but we tackled the mountains head-on to give us a better chance of
finishing the entire trail. We both suffered from some minor altitude
sickness after spending our first three nights at 8500′, 10600′, and
11400′, but most of that is behind us now. We hope to finish the
remaining 340 miles over the next 3 weeks, retrieve our car from
storage, and start our new lives in the Fort Collins area, about an
hour north of Denver and Boulder.

Again, sorry for the long delay…keep an eye out for our amazing
Colorado pictures!

Everyone,

I’ve posted new pictures:

http://eric.trailfaqs.com/photos/europe/

Corsica was really amazing, it’s been the highlight of our trip. The
hiking was challenging, the scenery was beautiful, and the feel was
much more Mediterranean than we’d expected. The only downside was the
lack of quality groceries.

The route we’d planned to take through the Alps was highly
disappointing. We discovered the hard way that long-distance hiking
routes in Europe are designed with overnight stops in mind. This means
that you’re usually climbing uphill out of a town or refuge each
morning and descending to another each evening, which is highly
frustrating when the elevation change is 1000 meters or more and the
trail is on a road, often a paved one. It was also very hot and dry in
the area we were hiking through, and we often had to carry 3 or 4
liters of water to last us the entire day.

So we abandoned that plan after a week and took a train to Chamonix to
hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. The scenery was amazing, as might be
expected, but the crowds were almost more than we could bear. Melissa
got stepped on and kicked by a tour group at one of the major passes,
if that’s any indication.

So we’ve given up all hope of enjoying further hiking in Europe and
have shifted gears. We’ve spent some time in Paris and Brussels, and
we’re now in Amsterdam about to depart on a two-week bicycle tour
around the Netherlands. I did something similar to this in 2000 and
really enjoyed it, so I’m hoping the two of us will find this ride
just as rewarding.

We’ve also decided to move our return flight up to August 18th, and
plan to do some canoeing in the Boundary Waters and/or hike the
Colorado Trail before we stop adventuring. I’ll send out another
update once we’re back in the States.

My girlfriend Melissa and I have been traveling in Europe for nearly a month now. After spending a few nights in London getting over our jet lag, we hiked the 256-mile Pennine Way in England, getting thoroughly soaked on an almost daily basis. I’ve just finished hiking from Glasgow to Inverness on the West Highland Way and the Great Glen Way, while Melissa has been volunteering on an organic farm in the Scottish Borders…we’ll be reunited in Edinburgh on the 18th once I’ve walked the 212-mile Southern Upland Way.

Our plan for the rest of the summer is to hike the 110-mile GR20 in Corsica and then a 1350-mile route through the Alps from Monaco to Trieste that will take up all of July, August, September, and maybe then some. I won’t be sending out many updates while we’re here, but I will try to upload photos to my website when possible.

Our flight back to the States is on October 10th. We haven’t decided where we’ll be relocating upon our return, but San Francisco is probably the leading candidate at this point.