The guilt woke me up this morning. Last night, after we had pitched our tent on the side of the quiet road, I remembered some of the guidelines for camping along the HRP. We were abiding by some of them, by not setting up our tent before 7pm and taking it down in the mornings before 9am, but I had forgotten about the other ones. The other ones had stipulations about sleeping a certain distance away from roads. It’s different depending on if you’re in France or Spain, of which we’re never really sure. It really doesn’t matter much. But one of them says you need to be at least an hour’s walk away from any paved road. We were clearly not following that rule. Not even close. ...

Our campsite last night, although desperate, turned out to be a good decision. We were up our earliest yet, at 7am and when we left around 7:45, we didn’t see another good campsite for about an hour. We had to cross into an active cattle pasture this morning, which I can only assume is some sort of easement. The cows weren’t as used to people as I expected. They seemed very interested in us. I was interested in not being trampled. It’s also unnerving when there’s a bull amongst the cows. I don’t have a good mental model for how bulls act, so I assume they’re wildly unpredictable and I tread very lightly. ...

Yesterday at the campsite, we met a guy from Phoenix, Arizona. He said he was trying to escape the heat. I told him he should be glad he wasn’t here last week. He looked really confused. I didn’t feel like going into details about our past 2 months in France and the recent heatwaves. I won’t be surprised when they return. Funnily enough, I woke up to rain hitting our tent this morning. My earplugs did wonders to dull the bells hanging around the necks of the nearby sheep. I figured since it was raining, no reason to hurry up and out of bed. When we did open the tent at 8am, we were the only tent left! I couldn’t believe it. We out-relaxed the Europeans! ...

What a long, hard day. Despite trying to sleep in, I was wide awake sometime before 7am. I think we were up and ready to go around 8. We walked the short distance from our Airbnb, without our packs, to the start of the trail. Our Airbnb was on the trail, so why carry your pack when you didn’t have to? We got to the ocean and went for the ceremonial Atlantic dip. It is tradition to start with a swim in one ocean and end the hike in the other. So with any luck, we’ll be swimming in the Mediterranean in a little over a month. ...

Hendaye is the start of the Pyrenees High Route. Yesterday we packed everything we had with us that we don’t need for hiking into a box that we’re mailing to ourselves for after this hike. The box ended up being bigger and heavier than we expected. Before coming to Europe, we intentionally scaled up some of our belongings, to help us with our time here. We knew we’d go through shoes, so we brought two pairs of hiking shoes, each. We also figured we’d be spending more time in cities, so we brought a nicer outfit for going out. For now though, that and the rest of our non hiking belongings is in a box on its way to our finish. I hope. ...

We are leaving Grenoble tomorrow, after spending 2 months here. Up next, we’re heading to the mountains to hike the Pyrenees High Route, which runs the length of the French-Spanish border. It should take us somewhere in the ballpark of 40 days. Before we leave, I wanted to reflect a bit on our time here. When we arrived in Grenoble, we had been traveling non-stop for over a year. To date, our style of travel left us quite exhausted, and in search of something more like a home base. When we started traveling in February 2025, we started with New Zealand, where we drove and hiked all over the south island for a month. After a brief stopover to see some friends in Australia, we flew up to Vietnam, bounced around southeast Asia, and found ourselves in Nepal in April. We spent a month in Nepal, hiking, before returning to the U.S. via Indonesia. We then prepared to hike the Pacific Crest Trail by hiking the Sunshine Coast Trail, in B.C., Canada, over the course of a week. We then hiked the PCT for 4 months and ended that with a friends and family tour before heading to Baja, Mexico with some friends for Christmas and New Years. After Mexico, we spent 2 months in Patagonia, driving around and hiking, largely living out of backpacks and the back of a rental car. And from Patagonia, we took a bit of time off with family before we spent a month hiking the Appalachian Trail. Not long after our time on the AT, we arrived in Grenoble, France. We arrived pretty tired. ...

The other week we took a trip down to the French Riviera. I think technically the French Riviera is a subset of the Mediterranean coastline of France, so maybe it’s easier to just say we went to the sea. We rented a car for 4 days from the Grenoble city center. We made the trip for a few reasons. First, it was insanely hot here in Grenoble. Here is one of a dozen articles from the NY Times, detailing the heatwave. To simplify the heatwave I would say temperatures were regularly 25 degrees above average (F), the French do not have air conditioning and are somewhat culturally against it, and the surfaces in cities (sidewalks, buildings) absorb the heat and radiate it well into the night. It was pretty unbearable. ...

Yesterday we decided to visit Annecy, a nearby town with a lake. It’s about 1.5 hours away by bus, which goes from city center to city center. We left Grenoble at 8:30 and came back around 20:30. We have been in Grenoble for about 6 weeks now. At first we had a bunch of excitement and enthusiasm to see many different things. As we explored more, the weather got hotter and we settled into more of our normal routines: exercise, eat, do some planning or personal project work, and sleep. I can pretty well trace our first lull in activity to our first heatwave here in Grenoble. It was too hot to want to exercise outside. It was then that I began to notice in order to exercise away from the bustle of people and cars and radiative sources of heat, I needed to run at least two miles towards the edge of town, through busy city streets. We also realized, visually, that despite there being a river through Grenoble, it’s not used for recreation. It’s way too fast moving and dirty. So we were looking forward to Annecy which should be a smaller, quieter town with direct access to a usable water feature. ...

We learned about the Tour a day before it was scheduled to start. Our background and interest in professional cycling isn’t too complex. After watching the 3 seasons of Tour de France Unchained, we were sufficiently interested in spectating. Those crowds are insane! The vibes would be off the charts. I don’t even own a bike. Although if you ask my mom, one in her garage is mine. I’ll take it some day. ...

We decided to come to France for up to a year! As U.S. citizens, we are allowed to stay in most of Europe for up to 90 days at a time in any 180 day period. We wanted to spend more than a summer in Europe so we needed to figure out how we could get around this restriction. We didn’t want to have to spend time outside of Europe to “reset” these days and so we explored the various visa options available to us. France has a visitor visa, VLS-T[S] that you can get for up to a year by essentially paying fees, showing you have sufficient funds to support yourself while you are here, and promising to not work. If you are wondering what sufficient funds are, I think it’s something like French minimum wage, so something like €23,000/person/year. ...