Maps and landscapes

The trail guides provide us with our most useful maps. We do Carry a small scale map of the Country, but only use it to get a broad picture of the area surrounding the large scale maps in the guides . In the Netherlands the guide had 1:25000 mapping, which was wonderful. The rest of the guides have 1:50000, that is harder to use, but with the aid of a stop watch works ok. We travel a little less than 5 km per hour and the strip maps have way points with distances between, so we can navigate. Most of the time the white and red stripes of the trail Marks, placed on trees, fence posts, and sign posts are all we need to stay on the path, but I like the maps.

For instance I just noticed that there are now contours on the maps, something not necessary in Holland. We noticed between Brecht and Sint Antonius there was movement in the watercourses and that they had turned into streams. Now we are hearing them gurgle in the woods. And we have been on our first hill outside Bergen – 20 m elevation.

The forests now have bigger trees, oaks, beeches, elms, wild cherry, pink chestnuts, hawthorne, pine and fir with an understory of rhoderdendron, in bloom now, and other unknown shrubs. The wood lots are located between fields and sometimes are managed as single species stands. Trees are cut selectively and we see evidence of timber sales.