August 11th, 7:30 PM, I fly from JFK to London, Heathrow. I’m only in England for a few days to establish legal residency (bank, insurance, health care, all that jazz), before I fly to Geneva, Switzerland. I buy a couple topographical maps and get a bus/ferry to St. Gingolph, a fairly unassuming lake-side town on the French/Swiss border. Then I walk to Nice.
I’ll be walking along the GR5, a trail that runs from Holland to Nice, though I’ll only be doing a 4 week subset of it. If my knee holds up (I’ve had mild knee problems in the last year), I’ll walk through some of the most beautiful Alpine scenery, hiking though montain passes up to 3,000 meters (10,000 feet), and eating phenomenal local cuisine. I’ll sleep under the stars most nights, but if it loks like rain, I’ll be anywhere from an unmanned refuge (think concrete baracks) to a mountain hotel.
I have to end my trip around Sept. 23, when all the refuges close, and the trail is largely deserted. Possible plans after than include a week in Ibiza or Nice recovering and eating more food.
What next? I don’t know. I really don’t. It takes real effort to make sure you don’t know what you are going to do, but my goal all along was to be open to whatever possibility arose. The most likely situation is that I move (ahem, I should say couch surf) to London for a while, maybe 6 months or a year, and see what happens.
I’ll be back in the US occasionally: my car is waiting in my mom’s garage, my cell phone has only been suspended and not cancelled, and maybe I’ll hate Europe’s topless beaches and want to run back to the safe, Puritan (and modestly covered) bosom of America.
But if I was a betting man, and I am, I’d say that odds are I’ll never move back to NJ. Sure, maybe NYC some day, or San Francisco, but this is it. I can only turn to the rather awful B-Movie, The Long Kiss Goodnight starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson for inspirational dialogue: (Video to be added soon).
If you want to see the overview of the trail, this is the map:
And here is a link to the start and endpoints on Google Maps.
Must say I’m impressed Stony!
hope you’ll have a *great* time!