Day: March 30, 2017

The original VF was made by the Archbishop of Canterbury around 950 AD. Presumably he went by the easiest and most direct route. The modern VF still goes from Caterbury to Rome but often deviates from his path. The reason is that the most direct paths are now often covered by the major highways. Highway engineers also like to take the easiest and most direct path. This makes for unpleasant walking. So most of the VF is not the original path. This makes it less “authentic” but a better walk.

The “Lightfoot” guide is one of the most popular VF guides and has been for 10 years. It defines a VF path and publishes guide books for it and provides GPX tracks for the path. In the past few years the EAVF (European Accociation for the VF) has taken a leading role in improving the VF. One way they do this is to reroute the path away from roads and onto nicer walking paths. Usually this makes the path longer but nicer. They also provide a set of GPX tracks.

Sometimes both Lightfoot and the EAVF provide alternate tracks for some parts. As a result there are many variants of the VF. We have both the EAVF and Lightfoot tracks on our phones. Usually Wynette runs the EAVF track and I run the Lightfoot track (on our respective Track Navigotor apps).

Each day we look at the two tracks and any differences and decide which one we want to take. Since we like short we often take the shorter Lightfoot tracks and do a little more road walking. Actually we like walking past peoples’ houses so it fits our tastes better.

We will discuss “authenticity” issues later in this blog but we can say now that the VF is more like the Portuguese Camino than the Camino Frances. The Camino Frances mostly follows the original pilgrimage path. The Portuguese Camino is more of a pleasant walk through Portugal and frequently deviates significantly from the original path.

The Camino de Santiago is very well marked. There are frequent yellow arrows, signs, cement posts, etc. It is easy to find your way with no guide book at all. Whenever you start to think “hm, I wonder if we are still on the Camino, maybe we missed a turn” you look up and quickly find a yellow arrow, reassuring you that you are on the path. The VF is not yet like that. There are some signs and most, but not all, turns are signposted. But there are very few markers between turns. 

Today we were on a path that was hardly marked at all. But, not to worry! GPS tracks to the rescue. There are smartphone apps that will record your walk in a “track” that is named something like fidenza-to-fornovo.gpx. Various guidebooks have done this for the VF and you can download the tracks to your phone. On your phone you use a track following app (we use one called Track Navigator) which loads the track and helps you follow it.

The photo is a screen shot of Track Navigator. It shows the track, or part of it. You can zoom in or out as you wish. The yellow arrow shows you where you are. The track you have already followed is orange and the track coming up is blue. The display shows how far you have come and how far you have to go.

But here is the great part. If you are strolling along not paying attention and get more than about 30 feet off the track, the app says “Off track” and continues to say it every minute until you get back on track. This happened 4-5 times today since the track was pretty much unmarked. If you watch the app carefully you can see the turns but if you don’t it warns you.

Without signs it can be stressful to know if you are going the right way but with the track navigator you always know you are on the right path.

The reason this track was so poorly marked is that it is a variant track that has been replaced by a newer track that avoids some roads. But the new track is two miles longer and we didn’t want to take it.

We have tracks for the whole way from Pavia to Siena on our phones and start the appropriate one each day. You can find on the web the tracks all the way from Canterbury to Rome on the VF.

Technical note: a GPX track is a text file in XML format. It has various housekeeping information and the bulk of it a series of “points” where each post has a latitude and longitude in degrees. There are expressed as fractional degrees using six places of accuracy which is enough to specify the point to within one foot. The point also has an altitude. It is pretty easy to modify these with a text editor. You can easily combine and split tracks this way.