Trail Stories - Is This the Summer We Quit?

Fab and Fitch met a year ago at a Facebook group hike in Gold Coast, Australia that Fab almost talked herself out of attending. Three weeks later Fitch moved in. A few months later they bought a van. Then a caravan. Now a tent, because they are 1,500 kilometers into the HexaTrek, France's 3,000-kilometer Grand Traverse, doing it together on their first thru-hike, with Billie the Australian kelpie cross cattle dog, across one of the hottest French summers in recent memory. On Day 62, after an afternoon of making plans to quit, they slept on an overgrown factory pontoon, woke up the next morning, and asked each other a question: is this the summer we remember failing to hike the HexaTrek, or is this the summer we remember walking 1,500 kilometers? This episode covers the question, the answer, the logistics of designing your own thru-hike on the fly around a dog who can't enter national parks, and the origin story Fab carries into every mile: the park in Hamburg where she asked a passing stranger what all those people in hiking gear were doing, and discovered that walking was the thing that was going to give her life back after losing her husband at 32. The full interview with Fab, Fitch, and Billie drops Wednesday in two parts on the Hiker Trash Radio feed.