This is our second copy of this guidebook, that describes the northern half of the Pieterpad in words and with maps. This one was teared apart, so I could only take the few needed pages with me each day.
Each stage is divided in 3 or 4 parts, with the map on the left page and the description of the route on the right page. Special sight seeings are marked on the map, and described next to the route descripten, or in a few case on seperate pages.
Although the Pieterpad is almost everywhere well marked with the white/red markings, on a few occasions it wasn't, and there we had to rely on the guidebook. The book was published in 2016, and since a few parts have been changed, latest updates can be found at the Pieterpad website.

We walked the 13 stages in 19 days (4 stays at holliday parks along the route in spring and fall), started on March 17th, 2020, finished on October 13th, 2021. Sadly our first steps on the Pieterpad coincided with the first Covid-19 lockdown. With all restaurants closed, we could not get anything on our way, and had to take drinks and food in my backpack. This also limited encounters with other Pieterpad walkers, which is, according to others, part of the fun.

On our last 5 days (October 9-13, 2021), we met and talked to some fellow walkers. Two ladies from Eindhoven and Zwolle did the same stages from south to north, and we chatted some every day. Although the restaurants were open again, we were to much used to take our drinks & food ourselves, so we kept doing that. ( )

In 1978, two retired ladies, Toos Goorhuis-Tjalsma and Bertje Jens, decided to take a walking holiday in their own country for a change. In the course of their walk they came up with the idea of creating the first Dutch long-distance walking trail, and accordingly changed their plans to hop on a bus to the far north and start mapping out a route southwards.

The result of that spontaneous initiative became the Pieterpad, still the best-known and most iconic long-distance walk in the Netherlands. It’s the one that everyone talks about doing “when I retire”, “when the kids are out of the house”, “when I get over my illness”, etc. The guides to the route (published by NIVON, the Dutch counterpart of the Austrian/German Naturfreunde) are currently (2018) in their ninth edition. Based on cumulative sales, the maintainers of the route estimate that by now around a million people have walked at least part of it.

The route links the village of Pieterburen on the Waddenzee coast in Groningen with the Sint Pietersberg on the Belgian border south of Maastricht, running roughly parallel to (and occasionally crossing) the German border, through the relatively thinly-populated eastern side of the Netherlands. Unlike many other long-distance trails, it doesn’t have any particular historical or geographic theme behind it, the idea was just to create the longest possible interesting and reasonably linear walk in the Netherlands. The “Pieter-” thing is simply a coincidence of names that appealed to the route’s creators - there’s no intention to suggest that the deeply-protestant farmers of Groningen would ever have had the crazy idea of going on a pilgrimage to popish Limburg.

Scenically, the most interesting bits of the route are the Drenthe boulder-clay plateau (rising to about 20m above sea-level) with large areas of heath and woodland and the occasional dolmen; the push-moraines of the Sallandse Heuvelrug and the Nijmegen area (only about 80m high, but in the Netherlands you don’t need much of a hill for it to start feeling mountainous…); the rivers Rhine and Maas; and of course the “proper” hills of the South Limburg chalk plateau. If you only want to spend a few days on the route, those would be the areas to focus on. If you’re cherry-picking, the most interesting individual stages are probably Zuidlaren-Rolde, Ommen-Hellendoorn, Hellendoorn-Holten, Braamt-Millingen, Venlo-Swalmen and Sittard-Strabeek.

But there’s also a lot of charm in the agricultural landscapes of the Vecht valley, the Achterhoek and the Maas valley, and even the stages that look on paper as though they are merely bridging a gap between known beauty spots usually turn out to be very interesting in themselves. Doing a long walk like this makes you look at landscape more closely, and really helps you to appreciate the charm in places you otherwise wouldn't take the time to look at. Particularly if, like me, you live in the West of the Netherlands and have "more exciting" destinations on your doorstep.

The Pieterpad avoids most big towns, but where you do come though one (in Groningen, Venlo, Sittard and Maastricht) the designers of the route seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to sneak you into the historic city centre without too much exposure to the boring outskirts. The smaller towns and villages along the route are not always as charming as you might hope - especially on the Maas, where so much was flattened in the fighting of 1944-45 - but there are enough “hidden gems” to keep you motivated even there.

Walking has been treated as a “poor relation” in the Netherlands ever since the invention of the bicycle, but there has been a revival in recent years (not least through the popularity of the Pieterpad), and there are more and more places where you can get away from paved roads and bike-paths. The Pieterpad does its best to take advantage of these, and most stages have a significant proportion of unpaved tracks (with the notable exception of Pieterburen to Groningen, where only about 2km out of 30 are unpaved).

The guides have improved considerably over the years, and now contain very clear 1:25k colour maps of the route in chunks of about 5km per page (they are actually 1:50k topo-maps blown up and overprinted with route information), with turn-by-turn route descriptions in both directions on the facing page.

The Pieterpad route gets revised frequently - you will notice that the distances you see on fingerposts along the way rarely add up to the same total (the overall length given in the 9th edition of the guide is 482km according to Part I and 498km according to Part II, published a year later...). It’s worth downloading the latest updates and corrections before you start - as of May/June 2018 there were ten updates in force, of which two were permanent route changes, four were temporary diversions (due to two sets of roadworks, a music festival and a flood), and the remainder were corrections or improvements to the text of the route description.

Even if you don’t read Dutch, you should have no problem following the maps and the red-and-white GR-style marking of the route itself, but you would miss out on the additional information in the books about local history, topography and culture. In most places the information in the guides concisely addresses the most obvious things you want to know about what's behind that landscape, tells you what to look out for and gives you a few fun facts about local oddities as well.

Doing the complete route involves a substantial investment of time: the guides divide the 498km into 26 suggested day-stages, so it would take you at least three or four weeks if you set out to do it all in one go, unless you want to go at a ridiculous pace and miss all the fun. Tweaking the stage boundaries slightly, it took me 23 walking days to complete it, spread over a little more than two months in spring/summer 2018. Like me, most of the people I met along the way (in spring/early summer) seemed to be doing day-walks here and there as time permitted, or sections of at most three or four days staying in B&Bs along the way - I saw very few walkers with big packs. Some people told me that they had been doing Pieterpad stages for several years.

The guides have a summary of the main public transport and accommodation possibilities along the route, but in both cases it’s wise only to use this for initial advance planning, and to check details on the internet, as this kind of information goes out of date very quickly. Public transport in the Netherlands is pretty good, even in many rural areas, so it’s not difficult to get to and from the stage-points if you’re not doing overnight stays - the only real transport problems I had were caused by a rolling programme of one-day bus-strikes across the country that nearly caught me out a couple of times. And the foot-ferry over the Rhine at Millingen, which has quite limited operating hours and involves a long walk to the nearest bus stop if you miss the last boat (that was one of the days I went for the “crazily early start” approach!). Car-drivers complain that it often isn’t straightforward to park at one end of a stage and get the bus direct to the other end, however. I came across various people who were doing complicated shuffles with two cars (or even a car and a bike).

There's quite a culture that has developed around the whole Pieterpad experience, and - especially in the most popular areas - you frequently come across little initiatives taken by local residents to make walking the Pieterpad more fun. Improvised self-service cafés in people's front gardens, tables with produce for sale, little free libraries, drinking-water taps, etc., almost invariably accompanied by jokey verses or illustrations of weary wanderers with steam coming out of their boots... ( )