Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with Simon Corder.

And the reason I'm slightly breathless and you can hear lots of crackling leaves and the odd

scraping of a walking implement.

I hesitate to call it a stick because it's actually just a whole tree branch I found,

is that I'm walking through the beautiful French Pyrenees,

and I wanted to share my journey with you.

Here's the situation.

I've been walking from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

Before, I'm going to say, about 23 summers. Slight pause during COVID, but the basic idea is that there are all manner of

fantastic walking trails, but there's a main pedestrian super highway known as the GR 10,

Grand Lundonay

which stretches from Ondai the Spanish border on the Atlantic all the way east to

banyos just north of the Spanish border on the French Mediterranean coast.

And the great thing about it is that you can pick a patch of maybe three, four, five days of hiking

and have a marvellous adventure exploring this lovely part of the world in relative comfort,

generally flying on Ryan there from Stansdid to a range of airports, maybe Gerona if you're approaching from the Spanish side, sometimes

Pippinion, Lourde and...

Oh! Toulouse, actually, where I arrived on this particular trip.

And September is a good month to do this because it's quieter.

The main hiking routes have got far fewer people,

which means actually it's much easier to find somewhere to stay up in the mountains.

There's all kinds of refuges and jit.

...