London Loop – 4 stages

On the The Saturday Walkers’ Club (I mentioned it on another post) I found the London LOOP.

The London LOOP is a hike around London. LOOP in this context means London Outer Orbital Path. It’s bout 220 Km. originally in 23 stages but nowadays it’s commonly done in 15 stages -a popular guide book divided it into 15 satges so that the length of the stages was more even, usually between 15 and 20 Km.

My favourite webpage to see the description of the stages is Luphen’s webpage, Luphen did the hike took photos and commented on each stage. For the detailed instructions I use the book and the GPX files for the directions. What I have on Luphen’s webpage is a personal commentary and photos to see what it will look like.

So far the London LOOP is very interesting – I see different parts of London that I wouldn’t see if I didn’t do it. Also, from the 4 stages that I’ve done a friend who lives in Uxbridge joined me for one and a half stages. Someone else will join me when I’mm near their zone.

The hikes so far are a mixture of fields, woods, canals and a bit of city. Also the stages are very flat and with varied scenery.

The start and end of the hikes are reachable by public transport and it’s possible to use the Oyster card which is convenient.

And the start and end of the hikes are easy to reach by public transport. They start and end near stations and with your Oyster card you can reach it cheaply.

It also solved my plans for many weekends: half of the weekend is London LOOP and the other day something else.

For the next stages and to have some extra challenge I thought:

• One stage walk as fast as possible (for the 15 or 20 Km.) and see which speed I can keep
• Do two stages in one day. I’ll choose two shortish stages that are together to do a longer than average walk

I also do some OpenStreetMap homework but this is for another post…