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Before I leave home

One of the most enjoyable parts of a long walk is the preparation. Once you have decided where you are starting and where you are finishing, you have to decide how many stages it is to be done in and where you are going to stay. And when you are going to do it.

The start and finish points were easy. Research on how to get to the start point showed that an early flight to Paris from Exeter was called for. This meant that I had to leave home on a Saturday as getting to the airport on any other day would be impossible. And therefore my first day walking would be Sunday

Looking at the maps of the GR4 it soon became evident that, at least, six days were required for the route. And that there was a shortage (actually, a complete lack) of places to stay between Malzieux and Grandrieu. This suggested a stage of 37 kilometres - something to be dealt with on the walk. So the walk would end in Langogne on the Friday.

The Details

The maps required for this walk are the IGN (French equivalent of the Ordnance Survey) 1:25,000 Serie Bleue maps. These are very good maps with lots of detail. My main criticism is that it can be difficult to read the contours. The contour interval is 5 metres and spot heights and contour labels sparse. Working out ones elevation can be a strain on ones eyes. Don't bother with the 1:50,000 Serie Orange maps. They do not give the course of the GR consistently. Bits are missed out, which can be extremely annoying.

The best and cheapest place to get the maps is from the IGN itself. The starting point is here. IGN will send the maps you order very promptly. Make sure that they are GPS compatible - but almost all of them are, now. Older versions have a very French centred co-ordinate system and are extremely difficult to calibrate for use with GPS.

There are 9 maps needed in all, although you could get away with 8. They are:-

Map number

Title

Cost

Remarks

2435 OT

Monts du Cantal €9.50 This is a Top 25 map - it covers a larger area

2535 O

Murat €7.50

2535 E

St-Flour €7.50

2536 E

Faverolles €7.50

2626 O

Le Malzieu-Ville €7.50

2636 E Saugues €7.50 You can do without this map - If you follow the GR4 you are on it for about 10 minutes! And I was not on it at all!

2637 E

St-Amans €7.50

2737 O

Grandrieu €7.50

2737 E

Langogne €7.50

In past walks, especially in the Cevennes and Cornwall, I have found the use of a GPS device to be extremely useful. And this walk confirmed it.

What I do, is load waymarks for the walk onto my GPS. These are at about 200 metre intervals or where there is a major change of direction. With this method it is very difficult to get lost. With a 200 metre interval there is always at least 1 waymark on the screen and usually 2 or 3. If you go off course it soon becomes evident. The disadvantage is that one is always tempted to follow the course on the GPS and not follow changes to the GR on the ground.

The means I use to get the waypoints onto my GPS uses OziExplorer. I scan the relevant parts of the map, load the image into OziExplorer and calibrate the scanned image to become a map. This means that a position on the image has map co-ordinates. The settings I use for calibrating the IGN maps are:-

Map Datum

WGS 84

Map Projection

UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator)

UTM Co-ordinates Zone

31
This is the number for this part of France. You will find it in the small print on the map in the form "Mercator Transverse Universel fuseau 31"

N/S

N
(France is north of the Equator!)

Easting

From the blue grid on the map times 1000
(i.e. 562 on map becomes 562000

Northing

From the blue grid on the map times 1000
(i.e. 4944 on map becomes 4944000

Once you have a calibrated map you can place waypoints on the GR route and, having attached the GPS unit, transfer the waypoints to the GPS. Once you have transferred the waypoints use them to construct your daily routes. I do not use routes while I am walking - waypoints are all I need, but they are good for planning and review. They let you know how far you have to walk each day and, at pauses, lets you know how much further you have to go. This can be important for ones morale.

I used to have a Garmin Etrex Vista GPS but, after 6 years of frequent use, the screen was getting rather wonky. Also the amount of memory meant that some means of storing tracks would be needed before the end of the walk. Otherwise I would not be able to use the GPS as I wanted. So I decided to get a new unit and eventually decided on another Garmin unit - the GPSMAP 76CSx. This I got, for a very good price from GPS Warehouse. The 76 CSx comes with a tiny microSD card. At least the card is tiny, it can contain a huge amount of data. The sort supplied had 128MB of memory but I replaced it with a 1GB version. On this I stored the contents of my Mapsource Roads and Recreation Europe CD. I also set up the GPS to log all my tracks to the data card. Thus i would have a map of some sort, wherever I was in Europe, and I had lots of space to include all my tracks.

Another use for the GPS was to help in the geotagging of my photographs taken on the walk. A GPS knows both where it is and what the time is. A digital camera records the time of each photograph. If you ensure that your camera and GPS are showing the same time it is an easy task (for the appropriate software) to associate a position for each photograph. The software I use is RoboGeo.

Travel to the start

I knew that there was a railway station at Le Lioran and this suggested that the easiest way of getting there would be by rail. My favourite rail planning site - the Belgian Railways site - available here. Showed that I had to leave Paris Gare du Lyon at 12:31. Unless I wanted to stay overnight in Paris I would need to get to Paris by air. Fortunately Flybe flew from Exeter to Paris, getting there at 9. I offset my carbon footprint at Climate Care. And my wife was willing to drive me to Exeter for the 6AM flight! She was going to drive to Langogne to meet me on the Friday afternoon so that we could have a holiday together.