easy hiking trails in Europe
London is the great survivor among the world’s cities: whatever opportunities history has come up with over the centuries, London always seized them with both hands. This explains why its skyline may be called dramatic but never picturesque: no painter would ignore the structural imperatives of a central motive quite like this. London’s tradition has…
No trip to Elba would be complete without a search of time past: a visit to places that are associated with the island’s most famous ever resident. A Bonaparte Pilgrimage Walk might feature stations all across the island: the central highlands with Napoleon’s summer residence in San Martino, for example, the west with the residence…
After our first foray into the spectacularly beautiful landscapes of Elba – a coastal walk, nominally, but one which turned out to involve quite a lot of climbing – we were a little apprehensive before our second tour on our itinerary. This route, after all, was to take us all the way up to Marciana…
Elba’s most famous visitor stayed on the island for roughly one year. He left, eventually (although he always emphasized how much he had enjoyed the experience), in search for a better job on the mainland. This did, in the end, not turn out very well for him (he lost his new job after a probation…
Savannah, jungle, farmland: most landscapes on Planet Earth fall into one of these categories. They are quite frequently separated by dozens or even hundreds of kilometres But on Mont Vinaigrier in the outskirts of Nice, you can visit all three of them within a couple of hours: arranged in a neat vertical stack and sprinkled…
How do you stand with military architecture? I mean: fortresses, fortifications and the way in which they have been constructed through history: how much does this interest you? Not all that much? All right, then that makes two of us already. It is not the naturally most fascinating topic on earth, is it? Personally, however,…
Unusual travel suggestions are missions from God. You may be familiar with this quote (it comes from Kurt Vonnegut). But the Easy Hikers have always gone one further: rather than waiting for someone to make such an unusual suggestion, we actively search for pretexts to go to places where one would not normally go. Because…
A frequent change in scenery: This is the key ingredient of a successful spazierwanderweg trail – according to the of the German Hiking Institute, which, after all, invented the whole concept of German “easy hiking”. The Haywain of the Teutoburg Forest Seen like that, a walk alongside a small country creek – and a particularly…
“Spazierwanderwege” – as the Germans call their designated easy hiking trails – are designed to pack the punch of a heavyweight into the frame of a lightweight fighter: this is what we learned last week. These trails have been engineered to provide hikers with everything they like: dense forests, idyllic views, scenic bodies of water…
Today and over the next couple of weeks, we are going to learn how to do easy hiking the German way. I can feel your feet are itching already! But we shall have to discipline our urges and, in the ancient tradition of German teaching, do some theory first before we can unleash our selves…