We plan to walk the entire GR5 starting in June 2002 and finishing at the end of September. Well, at least the plane tickets are now booked. The following is our proposed schedule. You can click on the Sections to see the daily schedule which includes details of our planned accommodation.
The guide books for the early sections, which are relatively flat, give the distances between waypoints. However, the guide books for the later sections, where the path climbs up and down mountains, give the times between waypoints. To relate these times and distances we have assumed a walking pace of 4km per hour. This is consistent with walking speeds quoted in some guide books and is fairly close to the progress we make with full backpacks. In the time and distance columns in table below, the bold entries are the values from the guide books, the other entries have been derived using the conversion of 4km = 1 hour.
You can also download the Excel 97 spreadsheet we used to create this table.
| Section | Start Point | Finish Point | Distance (km) |
Walking Time (hh:mm) |
Walking Days |
Resting Days |
Start Date |
| 1. Netherlands | Hoek van Holland | Bergen op Zoom | 115.0 | 28:45 | 6 | 1 | 06/06/2002 |
| 2. Belgium: Flanders | Bergen op Zoom | Maastricht | 233.6 | 58:24 | 10 | 1 | 13/06/2002 |
| 3. Belgium: Wallonie | Maastricht | Burg-Reuland | 148.2 | 37:03 | 7 | 1 | 24/06/2002 |
| 4. Luxembourg | Burg-Reuland | Burrange | 206.6 | 51:39 | 10 | 1 | 02/07/2002 |
| 5. France: Lorraine | Burrange | Abreschviller | 277.0 | 69:14 | 11 | 2 | 13/07/2002 |
| 6. France: Vosges, Alsace | Abreschviller | Giromagny | 283.3 | 70:50 | 13 | 1 | 26/07/2002 |
| 7. France: Jura | Giromagny | Nyon | 315.0 | 78.45 | 13 | 2 | 09/08/2002 |
| 8. France: North Alps | Saint Gingolph | Chalet de la Balme | 220.3 | 55:05 | 10 | 1 | 24/08/2002 |
| 9. France: Middle Alps | Chalet de la Balme | Briancon | 268.3 | 67:05 | 12 | 1 | 04/09/2002 |
| 10. France: South Alps | Briancon | Nice | 311.7 | 77:55 | 12 | 1 | 17/09/2002 |
| Total | 2379.1 | 594:45 | 104 | 12 | Finish Date 29/09/2002 |
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