This post is simply my recipe for publishing a book via Lulu although a lot of it may be relevant for anyone wanting to write up and format a book.

Though to be frank, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting the images printed correctly. With a lot of help from Lulu support we finally got good copies last week. Hence the delay in posting about the  GR5 Honeymoon ebook.

Next time (and there may be a next time!) I think I’d use Blurb since they review well for image printing. I may still use an uploaded PDF with Blurb rather than using their (admittedly very good) downloadable book creation tool since I think I’ll want more control over how it hangs together (plus I believe you don’t get much choice as to the style of cover with that tool – though I may be wrong!).

There is a wealth of instructional material on the Lulu site. But because there are a great many different options, I thought a very specific path through it all might be helpful to someone.

Besides – I wrote all this out as I went along so it seems a shame to waste it!

Recipe for publishing a book via Lulu:

Start with Google Docs:

To get the basic text right we both transcribed it into a Google Document (a free, online version of a Word document) and proof read it there. This meant we could work on it at the same moment and not clash.

It also meant it was pretty safe from hard drive failure and we could work on it from wherever we had an internet connection. But I still downloaded it as a Word document now and then out of paranoia.

Move over to a local copy in Open Office:

We then copied the whole thing into an Open Office Write document (which is another, free but not online version of a Word document) using a simple select all: Ctrl+A, then: Ctrl+C in the Google Doc and then a Ctrl+V in the blank Open Office Writer doc.

Working on a locally stored copy of the document gives you the ability to copy and paste images directly into it (using the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V). Not something to try with Google Docs since, even if Google Docs could allow you to paste images in, the image would have to upload before it could be shown in the document – meaning the process would be painfully slow on all but the most ludicrously high bandwidth connections.

If you’re working in Open Office – save in “Open Office” format! I was happily saving in “Word XP” format when I noticed that the Headers and Footers disappeared. It turns out that they are lost when going converting to and from Word documents (I’m not sure if they come out in an exported Word document since I don’t have MS Office).

At this poin it’s worth taking a look at the Lulu Book formatting FAQ.

For some reason, the Google Doc had used a mixture of newline and carriage return characters. So? Well they create different sized gaps in the text – which looks odd.  Here’s how to remove them easily in Open Office:

• Open the Find And Replace dialog: Ctrl+F
• Put this text in both Find and Replace fields: \n
• Click More Options
• Tick the “Regular Expression” box
• Click Replace All

Decide on the size of the book. With all the images we wanted to include, we went for the (standard) 20.95 x 27.31 cm.

Resize the pages to fit within the printed size of the book:

• Ctrl+A to Select All
• Format menu -> Page… -> Page tab

I decided against using “Full Bleed” (to print right to the edges) since that seems only to be appropriate when you want images to fill a page rather than text that needs a margin around it (unless I am misunderstanding it!).

Choose a font:

The received wisdom here is that a sans-serif font (like Arial) looks better on the screen and a serif font (like Times New Roman) looks better in print.

I simply don’t agree. I prefer a sans font in both formats so decided on Trebuchet MS.

• Select all: Ctrl A
• Select the font from the drop down.

Insert Page Numbers that are on different sides for right and left:

You’ll probably want to have no page number on the first page (probably a title page) then page “2″ appear on the second. Then, unless you have the page number in the middle of the page, page numbers should be on the right for odd pages, and the left for even (otherwise every other page has the number hidden inside the spine!). The first part of this process is very well decribed here (you might also want to look at the wiki page) but here’s a blend of both those instructions with some tweaks:

• Assign a different page style to page 1
  • Place the cursor on the first page
  • F11 -> Click on the 4th icon from the left: “Page Styles”
  • Double-click “First Page”
• Place the cursor in your second page and see what page style shows in the Stylist – probably “Default”
• Right-click “Default” and select Modify
• Choose “Header” or “Footer” tab (wherever you want your page numbers) and tick “Footer On” (or “Header on”), un-tick “Same content left/right” -> OK
• Insert the page numbers
• Go to the footer on that page, place the cursor inside it: double-click the page where you think the footer is or turn on View menu -> Text Boundaries to see it
• Insert menu -> Fields -> Page Number
• Select the number and hit the Align Right button
• Repeat on the second page but this time leave it aligned left
• Check the numbers are running okay down through the document

Insert a gutter:

A “gutter” is way of shunting the pages over to allow for the binding. Each odd and even page needs to be shunted a different direction, away from the binding.

• F11 -> Click on the 4th icon from the left: “Page Styles”
• Right click each of the page styles you’re using (Default and First Page probably)
• See also the Open Office page on this
• I went for: Inner 2.70cm Outer: 1.70cm

Add a table of contents:

• Insert -> Indexes and Tables -> Indexes and Tables…
• F11 -> Click on the 1st icon from the left: “Paragraph Styles”
• Find Heading 1 and right-click it -> Modify…
• Select the font etc to style the headings the way you want them
• Optionally add a page break before each heading: Text Flow tab -> Breaks -> tick Insert, Type: Page Position: Before
• Select the first heading, use the “Apply Style” drop down (usually in the top-left, below File) to select Heading 1
• Select that first heading, and double-click on click the “Format Paintbrush” icon (Note: double-click! that lets you paint the style again and again)
• Scroll down and “paint” the Heading 1 format over each heading
• The table of contents needs to be updated before it will show changes you’ve made in the document
• Right click it, and select Update Index/Table
• You’ll want to change the default Styles used within the document to suit your taste. That way everything you write or edit will be formatted correctly from the first
• Hit F11 to get up the Styles Browser
• These are the “styles”, font size, position, spacing etc. that can be applied to different parts of the document. If you select something, then double click the name of a style, that style gets applied to that selection
• But that’s not what you want to do here. You want to change the “Page Styles” which can also be applied by double clicking, but you only need to have your cursor on a page for it to be applied to that page AND all other pages in that section
• Most of the time you’re likely to only have two sections, First Page and Default
• (Autoupdate just means if you change the style of one of the elements in the document, all the other elements with that style will be updated too)

Check what Lulu makes of it:

Create a copy of the document, open it, delete all but about the first 30 pages and upload it. Then check how it appears by exporting as PDF following the Lulu instructions for Open Office and uploading it, then downloading it (something to do in the background!). You need to download it I believe, because I think that Lulu munges the PDF somehow…

Add the pictures:

It’s best to reduce the images in size to around 800 pixels since the size that they will be printed is almost certainly far smaller than the original images you have. You can embed them at full size but it will make a very large file size for the document.

We had them all in Picasa which made it very easy to export them at 800 pixels each (Ctrl+Shift+S).

It’s best to develop them all in sRGB (if that means nothing to you – relax, they’ll already be in sRGB unless you’ve used something like Lightroom and set a different colour space for the output).

Also, it’s best (with Lulu at least) to err on the brighter side.

I have a wide monitor and opened the images in Picasa Photo Viewer that comes with Picasa (if it doesn’t open when you double click a picture, open Picasa, Tools -> Configure Picasa Photo Viewer).

This step isn’t really required but to make life easier it’s nice to have the focus switch from Open Office to Picasa Photo Viewer as you move the mouse over then:

• Install the Microsoft Tweak UI Powertoy
• Start -> Powertoys for Windows XP -> Tweak UI -> Mouse -> X Mouse
• Tick “Activation follows mouse” (you’ll want to untick this again later – it gets pretty annoying!)

Add each image into the document:

• Open in Picasa Photo View (double click one)
• Ctrl+C
• Ctrl+V into the document
• Hold Shift and grab a corner with the mouse to resize the image whilst keeping the aspect-ratio correct

Adjusting images for brightness within the document:

We went through considerable pain trying to get the images to print with the same level of brightness as they appear in the document.

In the end, I paid an offshore firm to adjust the gamma (note – gamma, not actually brightness!) of each image for me and printed that. We increased the gamma from 1 to 1.5 in most of the images (I hand edited many back after they had adjusted every one).

This is the recipe for that gamma adjustment (you shouldn’t need to do this of course!)

Go to the View menu -> Toolbars -> ensure “Picture” is ticked

Select the first image in the document.

• Click the “Color” button in the middle of the floating “Picture” toolbar
• Adjust the “Gamma” control (at the bottom) and set it to 1.50
• Click each image within the document in turn and adjust the “Gamma” control to the same value

The above is a very good reason to have one book printed and sent to you for proofing!

Add a Creative Commons license:

Consider adding a Creative Commons license with a link back to your web site. Once you generated the HTML, put it into a text editor and enclose it in html tags before opening it in a browser and copying the text into the document. (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V).

Here are the basics of an HTML document: to use in Notepad:

<html><head></head>
<body>Replace this with the HTML from the Creative Commons site!</body>
</html>

Final checks:

Run down through the document, and insert Page Breaks with Ctrl+Enter (these are where a fresh page will be started when it’s published).

It’s a pain, but go through and move each image that’s been automatically sized to fit the margins as you’ve pasted it in. Just move them down a bit, then Ctrl+Z to undo that.

Why do something so odd? Because sometimes text gets hidden behind images.

As soon as you move or resize an image, any sneaky hidden text leaps out from behind it. So any that have been resized are fine, you only need do this to ones that are the filling the whole width of the page because they were automatically resized to fit as you pasted them in. I found a whole paragraph hiding behind an image when I did this. Spotting a single absent paragraph by any other method is very hard to be sure to do!

At this point I made a final search for words that I repeated too often since it was recorded as an audio diary: “So”, “nice”.

Then some final checks:

• Recheck layout and page flow
• Update the table of contents
• Check the header and page numbers are still there
• Spell-check one last time

Export as PDF following the Lulu instructions for Open Office.

Upload the main body of text now. This can take a while (I actually found it more reliable to use the web interface, rather than the FTP interface that Lulu recommends for larger files). This allows you to have a sanity check of the document at full size but also allows you access to the Cover Creator screen

Create a cover:

You can use the covers provided by Lulu but to be honest I’d only want to use my own. I chose a picture that could run all the way around from back to front.

I used Paint Shop Pro. You can download an evaluation version for a one off bit of work like this or you could use an even cheaper application like Pixel Image Editor which I think should be able to cope easily enough

• Calculate how big the cover should be with the Spine Calculator (I made it 48.29 cm X 31.75 cm) and create a blank Open Office Writer document of that size.
• Export that document as PDF.
• Upload your blank document. It will likely fail since it’s the wrong size by a fraction
• It will then tell you the size it really wants!
• Change your document to be the size it really wants…

In Paint Shop Pro:

• Resize the image so that the the smallest side is the right size, the other side was a bit over (Untick “Maintain Original Print Size”)
• Crop tool, set to CM and crop off the extra bit of the image
• Add in text using a manually set point size of 160 Trebuchet MS for the title, add it, right click the “Floating Selection” in the layer palette and Promote to full layer and name it “Title”
• Do the same at 80 point font for the authors
• Save as both native PSP (for later tweaking) and as PNG for inserting into Open Office Writer

In Writer:

• Open your cover document that you uploaded earlier (to check for size)
• Insert -> Picture and load in the PNG version

Finally:

Download the PDF document that you earlier uploaded to Lulu and give it a once-over.

Finally set up whatever options you want regarding purchasing as per the Lulu site.

I would take Lulu’s advice at this point and get a copy done and sent to yourself so you can check it over before getting any more printed or making it public.

As we walked the GR5 we made diaries, audio for me, written for LB. “LB” being a nickname, like “Red Yeti”. Some may be surprised by her actual name. Some who know us have been mighty confused by the “LB” mentioned on this blog!

So, assuming you don’t want to spend silly-money on a book about our honeymoon, take a look at the:

Free ebook version of A GR5 Honeymoon

(Right-click the link and select “Save link as” since it’s a rather large PDF file!)

Unfortunately it doesn’t come with the cover that’s on the real book – but that’s at the top of this post – just click the image and you’ll get the idea.

The first Big Walk we did together in the Polish/Slovak Tatra has now faded somewhat in detail with only the pictures, a single, rather retrospective blog entry and the odd good yarn that has been told and re-told to friends to remind us. We didn’t want the GR5, or in fact any other Big Walk in future, to fade so much.

I wasn’t sure that I would remember to make an audio diary every day but with the lack of other distractions I managed it almost without fail.

We then transcribed it ourselves, partly as a way of making it more accessible in future to look back on and partly to add the details that we didn’t think to mention in the original as we went.

And then the project grew…

We added LB’s written diary into the transcription, organised it into a semi-formatted document (using Google Docs which allowed us to both be editing and adding to the same document at the same moment).

We then decided it was very, very “dry” without some photos so they started to come in.

And eventually, we had something not far short of a book. So we decided to go that last mile and create one. Just for us, with a copy for each of our respective parents.

It was completed last November, a couple of months after we returned, but we had quite some trouble getting the images to print correctly.

At last it’s time to “publish” it to the world.

Not that I expect anyone to read it all! But it might be of interest to flick through.

I certainly don’t expect anyone to buy a copy. Particularly since it’s rather expensive. The price that you see is purely the price that the Lulu charges to print, there’s no profit margin on there for me.

But considering it’s around 260 pages with a photos on most of them, and it’s wrapped in a glossy, full colour cover and printed exactly to order – it’s not badly priced at all.

My brother once said “You have girl feet!”

He wasn’t referring to the size of them (most girls don’t take an 11.5UK) but the general lack of smell.

Most of the time it’s true. They do remain reasonably pong-free when compared to other people’s feet under the same conditions. Nothing in the laboratory you understand, just things like being on the hill for a while.

However, wearing shoes without socks is a recipe for disaster even for my feet. And the same goes for Five Fingers.

During the colder weather I’ve taken to wearing them with socks. Also last summer on the GR5 the socks were an attempt to give us a washable layer to prevent the hum.

But as the summer comes, I’m tempted by the ease of sockless Five Finger wearing. It’s easier taking them off when I reach the client site and swapping into them if I step out at lunch and yet again at the end of the day.

But whilst I wear the more work-appropriate footwear the Five Fingers sit in my bag… being rather warm and damp…

Which is certainly not the most sociable thing to have in an office environment.

So, I’ve come up with a solution that not only keeps me from getting too unpopular but also means I should have dry Five Fingers to slip into.

A 32X50CM (12.5X20 inch) OPSak (“Odour Proof Sack”) purchased from Top Of The Range and a pair of Dampire Dryzone Shoe Dryers to dry them out whilst they’re safely encased in the pong-proof plastic (which apparently is used for other bio-hazardous material as well).

That should keep everyone happy, especially my feet since they get to walk about in the Five Fingers as often as possible.

Edit 07 May 2010: Folks – Duct tape is not the same thing as Gaffer tape. Gaffer tape comes from specialist camera equipment suppliers and is very, very expensive. I can use Google pretty effectively and if I could have turned up actual Gaffer tape with a quick search or two, believe me, I would have done. What’s the difference? Read on! :)

I’ve been looking for Gaffer tape for ages and at last my search has come to an end, twice in the same week.

What? Surely you can walk in to any DIY shop or visit ebay to pick up a roll of Gaffer? Same as Duct tape – right?

Nope.

Duct (or should that be Duck tape?) tape is great stuff. It should be part of everyone’s repair and first aid kits.

But if you’ve ever used it (and really, who hasn’t?) then you’ll know it’s sticky.

Really, very sticky.

Which is rather the point. It sticks like… well, you know what.

But it’s also a drawback, you stick it on something, and when you want to peel it off, some of it stays. Or, worse, some of what you’ve stuck it to, doesn’t stay.

When the film and theatre industries started using it for sticking cables and other things that they didn’t want covered in glue, that became a problem.

So, they invented Gaffer tape. Named for the head of the lighting department on a film crew.

Its surprisingly hard to find. I eventually stumbled across it in the obvious place; professional camera supplies.

In the USA Adorama supply a 50 yard roll (they still use measurements that are impossible to convert between ;) and in Europe Calumet do it in a 50M roll (they also have a large selection in their US shop, and also in those odd measurements!).

It’s a specialist item, so, as the Wikipedia article has it; “[it] is therefore not a consumer good“.

Meaning it’s not cheap.

But if, you want to make things using tape or if you find yourself having to repair something that you don’t want to get covered in residual glue, it might be just what you need.

As we walked the GR5, we used a Spot tracker to record way-points along the route. It managed pretty well and only missed one day (oddly, I’m sure it was on…).

As we walked, I had it uploading to a page on the Spot web site so people could track our progress, but sadly it only logged the last seven days of activity. I hadn’t realised that I should have logged in to spotadventures.com and created an “Adventure” so that the way-points could be recorded permanently. The Spot web site, rather like the Spot tracker, doesn’t always have a very intuitive interface.

Luckily though, Google Maps allows you to import several track formats, so in they went. (It only shows 200 track points at any one time; scroll to the bottom of the list of points, in the left hand panel, to see more of them).

The great thing is, since Google Street View has arrived in France, you can see a couple of landmark points on the walk in an “interactive” format:

The start of the walk, just by the roofed-over shelter by Lake Geneva.

Our favourite village, St Dalmas le Selvage.

And the end of the walk, on the tiny beach at the edge of the marina in Menton.

In ordinary map view, try left-dragging the little orange man (in the top left, at the end of the scale) and as you wave him about over the map, the roads that have Street View are highlighted in blue.

Of course, there are only a few points where the Street View images intersect with our walking route, but it’s remarkably evocative to be able to see the route in such detail.

This posting is an assortment of “handy tips” for longer trips although some apply regardless of length.

I originally noted them in audio form as I wandered the GR5 and thought “Oh yes – must mention that on the blog when I get back…”

• House Insurance
• What To Do With The Car
• Leaving Home
• Photos
• Walking
• Weather
• Food and Water
• Repairs
• Wash Kit
• Sunblock
• Food On Returning Home

House Insurance

A lot of home insurance policies only cover you for thirty days away from home and won’t extend (and no it doesn’t count if someone comes to stay – I checked). So check when you’re renewing and don’t believe them if they tell you “Oh but no one does longer than thirty days” as my last insurance company actually did.

My mobile phone was also only insured for up to 30 days outside UK but it’s now covered on house insurance for longer.

What To Do With The Car

Car parking is no problem if you have your own drive or if you have someone to look after the car whilst you’re gone. But the road that I usually park in has had the cars towed-away during each of the previous summers (drain repairs, road resurfacing etc.) so I was considering using ParkAtMyHouse.com.

But eventually I left it near my brother’s place and he kept an eye on it. However, I created a new GMail account especially for the car and posted a tiny, tiny printed note under the tax disk in the windscreen that read “Want to contact the owner? : yourspecialaccountname@gmail.com“. After a month, someone emailed to ask when it was going to be moved. Since I’d set the account to forward to my brother, he got the email, moved the car and no-one got too grumpy.

Leaving Home

We print-off a check-list of things like “Empty Fridge” “Empty Bins” “Empty Kettle” “Turn Off Water” and cross them off with a marker pen just before we go. It’s relaxing to be able to run through the list and not leave the house with the nagging feeling that you might have forgotten to do something.

Photos

Charging cameras and other things I’ve covered under the videocast but it’s worth repeating that you need to ensure whatever charger you use will charge the item from when it is utterly flat.

Make sure the clock on your camera is set correctly, and synchronise it with whoever you’re walking with so that any amalgamation of your photos will come out in the right order. (If you do get them out of whack, like I did a few days in to the trip, then both Picasa and Lightroom can fix it without re-compressing your images).

I’d never use the “timezone” feature that some cameras are now providing. It’s not a standard EXIF field and so will be treated differently by different software, or more likely just plain ignored.

Walking

Try to build-in rest days to allow for such things as minor injuries and illnesses but mainly to allow you to stop somewhere that you think is wonderful and really soak up the atmosphere.

This might sound odd, but try taking smaller steps than you might naturally do when you’re faced with a long climb. I found that by consciously slowing down I could go far further and be less tired. Someone we walked with for a few days who was a very experienced long distance walker agreed wholeheartedly. Of course, after a few weeks, it doesn’t matter; you can bound along.

Stretch! And massage your calves and quad’s too. I only learnt last year that you need to stretch your calves with a bent knee and also with a straight knee so that you stretch both the Soleus (when bent) and the Gastroc’s (when… straight…).

Weather

Take a picture of weather forecasts and also of any noted-down email addresses of the people that you meet. After a few days of “zoning out” on a hike, it’s far too easy to forget important details or to lose small bits of paper. “Now… when did they say that lightning was coming? Today… or tomorrow?”

Food and Water

We always tried to keep one evening meal and one breakfast with us which worked out very well when we turned up to find that the only refuge for miles was closed!

A 10 gram mini-spatula made by GSI (they make those screw-together wine glasses) was perfect for scraping the soup of the bottom of the pan – you can’t do that with a spork!

We wanted to eat some tinned fish as a break from the cheese and dried sausage that was our usual lunch-time fare so we took an OPSak (Odour-Proof sack) to store the empty tins along with some tiny, thin bags to wrap them in until we could get rid of them. Which was sometimes three days – hence the thin bags; to allow them to be disposed of as cleanly as possible.

Most of the time I trust the water but not always. In fact, the times that you’re wondering whether you can trust the water are inevitably the times when you have little choice. So the Aquamira (or AquaVenture as it now seems to be called) came in very handy in allowing us to drink otherwise marginal sources. Over the seven weeks we used much more than I expected and I was glad I brought a new pair of bottles with me.

We never did need to use the special gas adapter since we found a standard, British/US style screw-thread canister that lasted us for the whole trip.

Repairs

I took four metres of Gaffer Tape but used every last inch. We weren’t the only ones to find that it ran out on such a long trip. What’s more, I have almost never used it in the past so it surprised me what uses I found. For instance, I lost a lens cap and had to make one out of Gaffer and shock-cord. I not only carry Gaffer for repair but it also forms part of my first aid kit (for slings or holding splints) so being without it isn’t good at all. In retrospect I should have taken around six metres instead of four. Which wouldn’t have added much weight.

I always carry a tiny tube of McNett SilFix if we’re using the tent, but this time I also carried a tube of ordinary McNett Seam Grip and certainly used that. It’s such phenomenally strong and sticky stuff that it’s well worth the few grams. I gaffer taped over the sharp corners of the tube to stop them damaging other things in the bag.

Wash Kit

I didn’t shave often during the trip but by getting a bag of cheap disposable swivel headed razors I managed to keep my shaving kit down to 14 grams. I simply took the handles off three of them and changed heads (I have a feeling Lighthiker might have thought of that already but can’t find it on his blog…). However, I’d do this differently now (and I did, at Xmas to ensure it worked): I’d just get some high quality, three bladed razor heads and simply shave with them without the handle. Try it, it works fine. The advantage is that the more expensive head lasts far longer than the single multi-day-growth shave that the cheap blades managed (sometimes they couldn’t even manage that without hacking my face to bits).

We took 60ml Nalgene bottles of shampoo and by staying in a very occasional hotel we managed to get it to last the whole trip. Of course we only washed our hair with shampoo every few days but even with the amount of hair I have (remember the name of the blog?) that was absolutely no problem.

We also only took a couple of tiny bars of soap each. Actually it was one large bar of pure soap, cut into six pieces with each of us taking two of those. But again, the little bars of soap provided by the hotels meant that we actually came back without using one of those two pieces.

Sunblock

We hate normal sunblock. We only like to use the alcohol based variety which can be very hard to get hold of. Since we both have definite Northern European complexions we burn easily and require a lot of block. So… we simply bought several tubes and decanted them into a Platy Bottle. With the Firelite Spout it went on really nicely. (Sorry, BPL don’t stock them any longer, probably because they sometimes leaked when used with meths in a Platybottle but it worked fine with the gel). We didn’t use it all so it should last us for some trips this summer too – but it’s worth knowing that it only lasts two or three years apparently.

Food On Returning Home

We hate shopping so we made up a Tesco delivery order for the morning after we returned. You can’t actually place an order long enough in advance to have it arrive seven weeks later so we changed our password and asked a reliable friend to push the delivery date forward until it hit the spot that we wanted.

Well, despite the fact I’ve still got several half-written GR5 write-up postings… Here’s the start of the Big Walk 2010 postings: Corsica, the GR20. It’s around 190 kilometres long with 12,500 of height gain (and loss).

We decided that we’d have to do it when we also decided that we’d have to walk the GR5;  as we listened to a Cicerone sponsored podcast with Andy Howell interviewing Paddy Dillon.

We’d considered going straight on to the GR20 from the end of the GR5 but realised that we’d rather just take our time meandering about on the GR5 instead. Which was certainly the right decision. After all, it’s not about how far you go or even where you end-up; it’s about the journey itself.

Although the GR20 is often described as “the toughest waymarked route in the world” it has to be noted that’s “waymarked” route (I think Paddy mentions exactly that in the podcast). By the sound of it, many “walkers”, including us, do more technical scrambling routes in North Wales, albeit for far shorter distances. None the less, it’s probably not the long distance route to be starting on as a novice walker, unless perhaps you’ve done some scrambling.

Once again we’ll be using Paddy’s excellent Cicerone guide book and taking  a TopoGuide number 67:  GR20: À Travers la Montagne Corse (from The Map Shop – as usual). The TopoGuides worked out very well on the GR5 since four of them cover the whole route. I’m also getting a couple of 1:100,000 scale maps to paw-over whilst planning and to get a feeling for how the whole route fits into the island.

It looks like the most practical way to get there will be to fly into Nice and then take either a ferry or a local flight over to Corsica. Which will mean we’ll be effectively picking up the walk from the point where we left  it last summer.

As last year, a couple of the Usual Suspects from other Big Walks will be joining us for the first sections before leaving us to complete it at our leisure.

Paddy outlines the route at fifteen days of actual walking. Add on another day each side for travelling to and from the start and finish points and you’re a couple of days short of a whole three working weeks. So we’ve decided to stay for those extra days to give us contingency on the route itself as well as some time to explore the more inhabited parts of the island once we’ve finished.

I’ll probably make most of the postings for this walk retrospectively since, on the one hand, I’ve not even finished the GR5 set and on the other, I like recording not only what our planning was but perhaps more importantly how that planning actually worked out in reality.

Excited now…

The volcano that sits beneath the Eyjafjallajökull (glacier) has started to erupt.

Which  is interesting since it appears that it’s emanating from Fimmvörðuháls; the col that we crossed on the last day of the Iceland walk (pictured above).

Apparently the “What to do if there’s an eruption” signs were well worth reading after all.

There’s a good picture and balanced article on Al Jazeera and not bad reporting but pretty poor picture on the Times Online.

Others are more sensationalist of course and no better pictures that we could find for the moment.

The fact that it’s coming from the col rather than actually beneath the Eyjafjallajökull is good news for Iceland since it’s less likely to cause massive flooding.

Of course it’s very early days, but at the moment it would seem likely that the route to extend the walk past Þórsmörk (Thorsmork) to link to Skógafoss on the coast may be out of action for a while.

Still, if the dreadful, derelict old hut near the col is destroyed that will be no great loss! I just hope the new one survives…