After finishing the Pieterpad in summer 2018, I did some more walking in Zuid Limburg, which as well as the Krijtlandpad brought me into contact with another long-distance route through the Netherlands, the Pelgrimspad.

This runs from Amsterdam, via 's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), to Maastricht. It takes a more westerly route than the Pieterpad, so you come through rather more "characteristic" Dutch scenery - polders, canals, windmills, big rivers - in the northern part of the route, then the Kempen (heath) country of North Brabant before you get into Limburg. It's fun to start in the middle of the busy city of Amsterdam and fight your way out into the country (although it doesn't really get properly peaceful until Day 3, when you're walking along the upper reaches of the river Amstel). Also unexpectedly fun to discover on Day 14 that you've just walked from Schiphol to Eindhoven Airport...

There's also an alternative end section that instead of finishing in the city of Maastricht takes you on to the Belgian border and links up with other international routes, including the Camino de Santiago. 

• Pelgrimspad part 1 on Wandelnet
• Pelgrimspad part 2 on Wandelnet

My Walk

I walked the first few stages of this route in Autumn 2018, then picked up the thread again about six months later. As of the beginning of May 2019, I'd completed about three-quarters of the walk; the rest was done in the next couple of weeks, apart from the stages in the Maas valley (Thorn-Roosteren-Sittard) which I probably won't do this year, because there's a major civil engineering project going on there to make the river more flood-tolerant, and by all accounts the walk won't be much fun until that's all settled down a bit.

The stages in the table are those I actually walked - as usual I made a few small changes from the suggested stages in the official guidebook, mostly for reasons of public transport accessibility: