Eleven days on the E5 Long Distance Hiking Trail

In late September, 2018, I hiked for eleven days along the E5 long-distance hiking trail. If you walk the whole thing, it starts off on the West Coast of France and takes you all the way to Verona in Italy, but when people talk about walking the E5, they mean they “hiked from Oberstdorf in Germany, to Meran in the North of Italy”. That piece is referred to as the Kernstück in German, the ‘core piece’.

That’s kinda what I walked, but also kinda not. The “standard tour” involves a bus in the middle to skip two days of valley walking through the Pitztal, but that valley walking was really nice, and with good Kasespäztle, if comparatively unspectacular. My original plan was to go all the way to Trento, to visit a friend who was living there at the time – but I didn’t make it that far, either. After a week, I decided that a few more days would be enough, and went home after eleven days to tinker on projects and catch up on life a little, and, y’know, I missed my friends.

But. They were a very beautiful eleven days. Maybe I’ll fill this post in with more details later – I still have stories to tell about “Fernwanderwege being the best German school you could ask for”, electric fences being the work of Satan himself, finally coming to appreciate Radler, and being licked by cows. In the meantime, here are some photos from the path.