Backpacking Pieterpad

For the non-Dutch people it might not sound familiar, “het Pieterpad”, but in the Netherlands it’s one of the most well known long distance trails that has been laid out (Stichting Pieterpad, n.d.). It has been layed out in 26 legs that are somewhere between 15 and 22 kilometers each.

There is a foundation that looks after the trail, called the Pieterpad Stichting (roughly translated: Pieterpad Foundation). They look after the trail and provide a lot of information on their website, pieterpad.nl. This is also where we get our information.

As for walking the trail there is a guide they sell, but we use the komoot app where we’ve laid out our own Pieterpad legs. As an example, see our first leg here: komoot.com/tour/1072268722. I’ll be posting about each leg we walk, so you’ll be seeing a lot of these komoots in the future!

So as we said, Pieterpad provides a couple of legs, yet we’re setting out our own legs using Komoot. Why don’t we just use the “regular” legs provided by the foundation? Well, we do loosely follow the legs the foundation has laid out. But because we’re dependent on public transportation, we need to find the spots were we can get by public transport. This means, for example, that we either have to walk a couple of kilometers to get to the starting point or from the end point to the nearest bus stop or rail station. So for us, we base our legs solely on the start and end points, which in turn are based on bus stops or train stations. So if you see a post in the future that is complete not in line with the legs from the Pieterpad foundation, it’s most likely because we weren’t able to get there by public transportation.