After the tour is before the tour, and the last one has been too long ago. It's been more than 7 months now that I came home from Belluno in 2018, and my feet are itching to get back onto another trail. Of course there's already a plan. This year, I'm going to walk parts of the Salzburg Triest tour, starting in the mid of June and hoping that snow levels on the high altitude passes have melted down enough it won't be too difficult. Since the tour has 28 legs and I only have three weeks off, I'll start further into the trail at one of my favorite spots, the Königssee in Berchtesgaden.

I'm already busy studying the guidebook, optimizing daily mileage and, of course, fiddling with the contents of my pack. It's crazy how pack weight goes down with every experience. I remember starting out my first multi-day hike with a sevent liters backpack that weighed 3 kilos while empty, and I had to put stuff outside because I ran out of space. Luckily, I never weighed it! This year, I'll be starting with a base weight of around 4.15 kilos (9.15 lbs), and after walking along experienced long distance hikers for parts of last years Munich-to-Venice redo, I finally convinced myself to switch from heavy mountain boots to sturdy trail runners.

My tour will, like I said, start in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, cross through the beautiful Sea of Stone and into Austria, almost scratch the 3000m (9000ft) altitude there and head south about 80km east fo previous year's route. In the southern parts, I'll switch into Slovenia with its famous and steep Triglav mountains before finally entering Italy.

Some key figures for this tour:

Here's an image from 2018 of one of the huts I'll pass by on my second day, the Ingolstädter hut at the edge of the Sea of Stone: