“I want to walk around Luxembourg”, I said …why would you even consider Luxembourg? one would respond, what is there to see in Luxembourg? Grey buildings and banks? Well, that is why I would walk around it, see!
I have drawn a circle around Luxembourg, merely touching its borders. This circle is obviously 360 degrees and by pure coincidence 360 km long!
The plan (in 2018) is (was) to walk the circle in 6 days of 60 km as a challenge to my body and mind. 60 km is quite a lot for a day but far from impossible, six time that is another thing!
UPDATE 2022: Due to Covid this plan was postponed and my stamina is not as good as it was, so the 60km thing is passé. I still consider walking it, but this time is parts of 30 to 45 km. Secondly I want to enjoy this circle more than ever before, this is my (post?) corona circle.
The drawing of a circle on a map is quite a challenge, It is done on paper maps and later on on Google Earth which has some rudimentary tools to draw things. Once a circle is drawn I make a quick tour to see where unsurpassable obstacles such as airports, highways and rivers would distort the final circle too much. This operation would take minutes at first but hours once a circle passes the first tests and checks. I made dozens of circles before I had the right one.
Once the circle is established I start drawing the exact path I would walk. Because I want to stay as close as possible to the circle this involves some extended research on several platforms. Because of inaccuracies in maps I have to compare open-street maps to google maps and apple maps (sat) and topological maps,…
I was super satisfied I finally had a circle that worked, I drew the whole path, days of work, to zoom out and notice the hole f*ck*ng thing crosses the Luxembourg border! Horror! While checking how I could repair the damage I noticed that the place I crossed the border was actually Schengen, wow what a coincidence, my illegal border crossing was in the exact place that symbolises the freedom to cross borders in the Eurozone (for us Europeans :-/) This is perfect.
While drawing the circle I noticed it passes Steffesheim in the North in Belgium just a few km of Germany. I spend a whole summer there as a 17.9 year old as a volunteer on a building site of a village farm destined to welcome alcoholics from the Marrolles area of Brussels, what a coincidence. The purpose of the place is no more, it is now a ferienwohnung (this is the German speaking part of Belgium)
I planned the tour on the 21st of March 2020 in the week of the Equinox with equal days and night because 60km times 5km/h is 12 hours and numbers are a part of this adventure. Two weeks before departure I canceled the trip because of the Corona lockdowns, walking in four countries would have been impossible.
Hope to pick up this plan later on.
