The most popular of all Dutch long-distance footpaths run from North to South, close to, and sometimes over the Eastern border: the Pieterpad – named from the start and finish: from Pieterburen in the high North, to the Pietersberg in the South, just oven 400 kilometers. It connects to the European routes that run through the Netherlands (E2, E4, E5 and E8). Other than these routes, that all have an ancient history, the Pieterpad has iit’s origin by Dutch walkers – two friends that wanted to create a long-distance footpath. Today, it has a status – You haven’t walked unless you walked the Pieterpad. The result is that the path can be quite crowded – not exactly what we have in mind …
Well, we can’t escape. There are nice walks to be done. Because the path is ‘artificial’, the neighbourhood of public transport has been part of the design.
To cover it all, this is the page to get to the images. Tracking data can be accessed from that page as well.
Month: March 2009
Dieren-Brummen
The Dutch railways have set up walking routes from one railway station to the other – and this one can be walked by description, map – and GPS data. So I downloaded the GPX file: both route and waypoints into Mapsource, and loaded it all, inclusing surrounding maps, into my GPS unit.
The walk leads into the Veluwezoom National Park, then with a large bend back to the railroad. It follows three long-distance footpaths: The Veluwe Zwerfpad, Maarten van Rossum pad and Trekvogelpad. Most is through woods – but the environment can be quite different: Open woods of beeches on the high grounds; dense, dark patches of pine and fir; open at other places; or patches of woodland between meadows and acres. This can be seen in the images I took.
Of course, the walk has also been tracked, and can be downloaded in Garmin, general and CSV formats.
The original description and map, as well as the GPS data can be downloaded from this web page.
Den Ham – Ommen vice versa
This is a walk designed from the Havezatenpad and the Sallandpad – two long-distance footpaths in the neigbourhood of Den Ham. We were staying at the Melody Farm and had to walk about 5 kilometers to joint the signposted paths. At some places, the mapped route was blocked or unclear so we had to take a diversion. Halfway, part of the group took a shortcut back, the rest continued to Ommen ans returned along the route. I went on along the Regge river, adding a few kilometers to the 30 of the ‘normal’ route.
I didn’t bring camera of GPS, so all I have is the track as re-designed – afterwards – in Garmin and projected on Google, and the route data in Garmin, generic and CSV formats.