Starting with the tubing in the basement, I replaced some plastic anchors that were the wrong size, did some extra work to cut some tubes which I had already put in place, but were a little too long, and got things set up a little better.

Each plastic tube can only fit two cables, so I got a second set of tubes up with the third wire in place, and measured exactly how much cable I needed to get each cable to the refrigerator, oven, and range, respectively. I was very pleased to find that after having cut the third cable, I had room for a fourth. It took some more work to get that fourth cable into the second set of tubes and fed up through the ceiling into the kitchen, but it fit just fine, and now I have a cable for the hood as well.

With that done, I started on the kitchen wall, making holes for the electrical sockets for the oven and hood. The range doesn’t need a socket, as the range will have to tie in directly to an electric cable in the wall. The electric cables take a path from the wall, to the refrigerator socket, to the oven socket, to the range, and up to the hood.

From there, I needed a way to feed the cables through the wall all throughout this path in the wall. I opted for the easiest path for myself, which is simply to cut away the drywall on the whole path. It’s a bit ugly, but the wall is a weird material with no actual space in the interior, so it would have been difficult to try and break up the cardboard cubic forms behind the drywall without accessing them directly. This way, I simply cut away the drywall, removed the cardboard, fed the electric cables through, and will have to plaster over the cables to fill in the wall.

I started on the plastering up top where the hood is first. The goal is to get this portion done so that I can put the board back up which forms the back of the upper cabinets, and do the upper cabinetry.

The one thing that I am skipping by working this way is connecting the eletric cables to the circuit breaker, finishing the eletric sockets, and testing the appliances. I’m certain that there won’t be an issue with the appliances, and even if there was, having the wires plastered over wouldn’t be an issue.

I stopped work there, with some of the plaster done, and the wires sticking out of the wall. The next step is to smooth out some plaster work, and then get the board back up, and continue the upper cabinets.

Armed with those, I got to work drilling holes in the concrete basement ceiling and setting up a few tubes. I fed a couple of cables into the tubes, finishing the path of the two cables I had started yesterday. I started on a new set of cables from the circuit breaker box.

At that point, I was tired and decided to stop work for the day, rather than risk making a silly mistake. Not much progress today, but that’s all that could be done with limited time and energy.

My plan was to get the electrical wires in place from the circuit breaker, through plastic tubes which need to be attached to the basement ceiling, and up through the basement ceiling, into the new kitchen wall. I probably need four separate cables: one for the refrigerator, one for the oven, one for the range, and one for the hood.

Four separate cables requires a lot of work to implement. The cables need to be guarded by plastic tubes which sheathe them from possible damage. Those tubes need to be attached to the ceiling, which is concrete block. Therefore, I had to use a big drill and implant plastic anchors which are made for this job. I didn’t have enough plastic tubes and anchors to finish the job, I will have to buy more.

Feeding the cables themselves into the tubes is not so easy. Two cables can fit into one of the largest size tubes that are sold at my local hardware store, but getting them both in takes a lot of tugging and pushing. I successfully fed two cables all the way from the box in the basement, along a path of a few turns, and up into the kitchen wall.

More work had to be done to enlarge the hole between the basement and ground floor of the house, inside the kitchen wall. I had previously made a hole, but it was only big enough for one wire. I enlarged that with masonry tools, and it might fit four cables now.

Overall I didn’t accomplish that much today, but I’m working on the right part of the project. If I can get the cables set in the basement, fed up into the kitchen, and connected to outlets at the right points in the wall, I’ll be able to build cabinets around those outlets.

All that takes a lot of work, and it’s depressing to think about the idea of making big mistakes and getting the project wrong. So, though I’ve bought the materials and done some work on the project, I let it sit for a long time, dreading taking it back up again.

This month is the month that the kitchen gets built. There is plenty of work already done, so I think it’s quite possible to get it done in March, though there may be some materials that need to be ordered near the end of the month. In any case, I’ll be working on the project every day, and documenting the progress made.

Today, I started with a piece of the upper cabinetry. I say a piece, because I’m doing the cabinets in a non-standard way, building them myself so that they fit the space exactly. Today I took a piece of relatively cheap pine board that I had cut long ago, and attached it to the wall.

I cut this piece so that it would fit above the refrigerator, and extend far to the right. The tricky thing today was getting it in place, and being sure that it would support the weight of the upper cabinets and their contents. To do this, I opted to use screws that come with anchors, which can be seated in the wall with a special tool in such a way that they cannot slide back out, and apply pressure to a larger area of drywall.

With ten of these, I carefully made my marks in the board, then the children held it up on the wall while I marked the wall as well. As is tradition, my screws almost lined up perfectly with the anchors, but not quite.

We patiently tried again and again to get everything to line up correctly, as I made minor adjustments and continually dropped the little plastic washers that come with each screw. Finally, in a fit of frustration, I simply enlarged the entry holes in the board enough to give me the room necessary to hit the right angles.

The board is up. It’s in the right position, and hopefully it will stay there. There are two issues which I have identified so far. First, I can see that the heads of the screws protruding from the board will force me to make modifications to the cabinet walls, because I want the walls to hide those screw heads. Second, the plug for the hood may require me to make a hole in the board, and that might require me to take the board down.

In any case, the project is moving. I’ll have to think about the next step I want to take.

The children and I had taken some time Wednesday to do some Thanksgiving crafts. I bought some colored paper and silly eyes that can be glued on, and we made little turkeys. Miriam is quite good at creative arts, and after just watching a video of a craft, she can pretty much duplicate the whole thing. I showed the children a wreath made of a cardboard ring with leaves of colored paper glued on, and she made that herself from a cereal box and colored paper. Each leaf had something she was thankful for.

When it came time for Thanksgiving dinner, Alex had outdone herself yet again. She prepared a whole chicken as well as wings, as well as a sweet potato dish, some seafood, and various other things which completely filled the table. I enjoyed talking with friends from church that we have not spoken to in some time. We caught up over the latest news, and discussed their upcoming move to Switzerland.

The children of all our families played together, running all over the house and enjoying themselves quite noisily. After the dinner, Miriam showed the other kids how to make a pilgrim hat out of colored paper. There must have been at least eight children in total, making for a lively night.

I myself enjoyed getting the fire going earlier in the day to create a warm space for our meal. It’s nice to host people and fill up our large dining space with everyone. We brought up an extra table for the children.

Though Thanksgiving is an American holiday, it is one many of our French friends appreciate for its simplicity and relatability. We all have things to be thankful for, including each other, and we all enjoy sharing a meal together. Each year, Alex tells me that this year she won’t have time to prepare anything for Thanksgiving. And each year, she decides that actually she would like to celebrate with friends, even though it is a lot of work. I’m hopeful that we will do the same again next year.

Planning

The idea which I want to repeatedly drive home is that a family must be full of capable hikers to do this trail. You need to extensively plan this hike in order to accomplish it, and during that planning you will discover the various challenges. The first and most obvious is that in order to complete the hike, you will need to climb up a total of 8700 meters. Secondly and more importantly to me, there are very few places to get food on this hike. My main issue is that I’m not interested in eating out at restaurants or paying for the expensive refuges along the trail, but really that’s almost all there is. My plan for food resupply worked out, but it made for a difficult hike. Finally, besides the aforementioned cliff edges which form quite a lot of the trail, the terrain is just basically quite difficult, with several portions on which you need to hold onto a wire for safety. You also need to climb up by hand several times. This can be hazardous when done in the rain or high winds.

If you have already done a hike with your family, then you know to start planning months in advance. I won’t go into the budget you should set aside, because in my view your health and happiness are the most important, and this hike being what it is, you should not prioritize savings over your hiking experience. Ultimately if you don’t stay at refuges and don’t eat at restaurants, then you aren’t going to spend much at all. If you spend every night in a refuge, that will drastically increase your spending.

Your family’s hiking ability is the most important factor to consider. If you can’t hike continuosly for most of the day, then you risk being in a difficult position. You could alternatively hike at a faster pace than we did, but I would caution against unwarranted optimism when it comes to hiking fast with your children in the Alps. For us, we are a determined bunch, and with good planning we were able to meet our goals and keep enough food to get us to where we needed to be each day. This, in turn, allowed us to resupply when we no longer had food to eat, and find good spots to sleep each night.

Dates

This is a summer hike. In my experience, the hottest month of the year in France is August, and so I wanted to hike the Ubaye when our home would probably be too hot to be comfortable. I knew that being up at high altitude, the heat of August would be well-tempered by the cold air of the Alps. I’m happy with our choice to do the hike in the middle of August, as it made for beautiful sunny days in the mountains for most of our trip, and those times that we experience rain and cloud-cover were acceptable given the higher base temperatures.

Travel

For public transportation, the launching point is the city of Gap. From there, you take a bus towards Barcelonette, getting off just before at La Fresquière in Méolans-Revel. I think I may have made a minor mistake in our travel plans, as I bought cheap tickets from Paris to Marseille, then took a regional train back North to Gap. I didn’t realize that a night train exists from Paris to Gap, and that we could have used that instead of spending a full day to travel to the start of the trail.

Not having a train station in the vicinity was a new experience for us, but it all worked out fine. The bus travels between Gap and Barcelonnette several times a day, and we were able to travel to and from the area without issues. That being said, there were no good opportunities to quit the hike and find public transportation in the middle of the hike. Certainly options can be found off-trail, but the most sensible thing to do is simply finish the hike if at all possible at La Fresquière.

Clothing

I suffered a little bit because I did not bring a jacket or raincoat. I only had a very light T-shirt and shorts. In August, I did fine with that for the most part. There were a couple of occasions in the early mornings or at high altitude where I started to get rather cold and needed to hike faster to get out of a bad situation. My decision was based on a backpack chock-full of food for my family, but that was an extreme case. For a summer hike, I think a T-shirt and shorts should be fine, with the addition of a raincoat.

Gear

I have already spoken about our gear on our first hike, but the summary as a hiking family is that we share as much as we can. Me being a bit more experienced, it was convenient for me to carry our 4-person tent, and relieve any extra weight from our children and my wife as much as possible. This is an important point if this is your first time hiking in the Alps, as the altitude gains will increase the difficulty enough that you won’t want to be carrying any unnecessary gear.

Our 4-person tent once again worked out very well, and basic 3-season sleeping bags were fine for a summer hike in the Alps. It got chilly at night, but we did not normally sleep at very high altitude. As previously stated, the adults carried 35-liter packs, and the children carried very small childrens’ backpacks. Our basic strategy remained the same, and the children carried food and very lightweight items.

We carried extra fuel (alcohol) because we knew we wouldn’t find any to buy along the way. Though it was heavy at first, over time it became lighter as we continued to cook our meals, and we used it all up by the end of our hike. Cooking meals worked well for us because dry noodles are quite light, and are acceptable for our children plain, and with some basic sauce for us.

We didn’t carry the children’s cameras, enjoyable as they were on the first hike. There were very few opportunities to recharge them, and we wouldn’t have gotten much use out of them before they became dead weight. I only was able to recharge my own phone one time, and barely used it except to take photos and write my daily journal entries.

This hike really enforces the ultralight principles if you are bringing children, as they will not be able to carry much weight, and yet require food and sleeping gear for days of hiking. My backpack never really got much lighter as the hike went on, as I continually replaced eaten food from my pack with other things taken from the rest of our family.

Test Hike

We did a short test hike, not to train specifically for mountain hiking, but rather to get in the rhythm of walking together, and preparing to cover a good amount of distance each day. We hiked back to Rambouillet from another town along the GR1. The test hike showed us we needed new shoes, and prepared us a little bit mentally for the challenge of the GR56, just in terms of hiking together as a unit. The real physical challenge of the Alpine terrain was something we could not have seen in our region of France.

Hiking

Given the difficulty of this hike, I really recommend planning everything in detail. Have your goals each day, knowing that you want to get a certain distance in order to not run out of food. For us, we hiked over four days before resupplying in Larche. Before that, the only other food we got was bread in Bayasse, and a galette in Bousiéyas. The fact that there was not much to eat between those two points determined much of our hike.

The walk itself was quite challenging, with over 1000 meters of elevation gain each day. We found that we were a bit stronger in the mornings, with the children being less motivated in the afternoons. Of course, it was also colder in the mornings, so I was pushing us to keep moving as we hiked through high Alpine passes in a chilly breeze before the sun had warmed us.

Going in to the hike, I thought that it would be a lot of fun to sleep in the cabins that are strung out along the trail. And indeed it was, but we were only able to do that on the first two nights. After that, the cabins were all locked and private, and the few cabins that were public were in poor condition and not necessarily in the right spots for us to stop.

We were once again amazed at the resilience of our children, who laughed and played at night in the tent, despite having hiked all day and up at high elevation. They did their fair share of complaining, but they accomplished the feat of the GR56 nonetheless, and we are quite proud of them. Once again, I don’t recommend doing this hike with young children because the level of difficulty may make it unenjoyable for them, and for you as well. We definitely crossed that line at times during our hike, when the hike became a task instead of an adventure.

It was still a positive experience all things considered, and it gave me another reason to be proud of our family as we held hands at the finish line, back where we started after completing the GR56 loop.

When I first arrived, I quickly surveyed the roof, which was completely rotten. It was missing several sections, and I didn’t want to save any of it. I immediately got to work tearing it down. I’m a complete amateur do-it-yourselfer when it comes to repairs, so I took my time and relied on working long hours to keep the project moving forward. The first day, I removed each piece of wood by hand, slowly removing nail after nail, and tearing down the roof while not endangering myself too much. Mostly, I didn’t feel comfortable climbing up on top of the rotten porch roof, so I worked from a ladder, which slowed me down.

By the second day, I was tired of working from the ladder, and I worked up the courage to climb up on top of the rotten porch roof. It was a huge time-saving decision. The second half of the porch roof came down much faster as I was able to pull off pieces of wood more quickly and easily. Near the end of the demolition work, I simply pushed the remains of the entire structure out onto the lawn, where it busted apart.

Throughout the entire process, I was going back and forth to The Home Depot many times. During one of these trips, I bought lumber which was designed to replace the large square pillars holding up the porch roof. The pillars available were not as tall, and so I decided to salvage the existing pillars. What really surprised me was that I found the existing pillars to be completely unattached to the porch itself. It took some time and trial and error, but eventually I was able to rent the equipment required to anchor those pillars into the concrete and I was satisfied with the stability of the pillars.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the process was the framing. I like working with wood, because it’s relatively easy to work with and mistakes are easy to correct. Though I did a good job making the framing secure, I made a mistake in my measurements by not considering how much I was going to have to cut the plywood boards I was placing on top of the frame.

Another of the many challenges I faced was the curve in the wraparound porch. I was able to find some flexible pseudo-boards that could be used for this curve. I attached a series of boards along these in order to keep the right shape for the curve, and though it was a time-consuming process, I got the result I was looking for.

With the frame done, I just had a few more days to add the plywood layer and finally the actual roof shingles. The plywood took me some time because I had to cut each piece because of the nature of my framing. As with all the other steps before, I got the result I wanted after working hard for long hours. The roof shingles themselves was another story as I unknowingly placed down a roll of very sticky roof shingle material, not realizing that it would negate the need for shingles themselves.

Though I had not envisioned it that wasy, I stuck with the rolls, and covered the whole porch roof with those. The result probably isn’t much to look at, but it should keep the roof from sustaining water damage like its predecessor.

This was a tough project for me which took about 10 days of hard work. Doing the project alone meant that I was constantly losing time by going to the store, and I had to carefully plan how to handle the heavier materials. I probably adujsted my ladder upwards of five hundred times. I’m proud to have finished the project in the allotted time, and all for a budget of less than four thousand dollars. I was quoted fifteen thousand by a carpenter over a year prior, and I’m not sure that would include everything.

It’s not the end of the work I will have to do on this house by any means, but it4’s a good start that radically changes how the house looks from the street.

Planning

Two to three months before the hike is set to begin, you should start the planning. This gives time to locate gear, organize transportation, and ensure that you are ready for your hike. In order to ensure that money is not an issue, set aside a budget of 1000 euros for the trip. The actual cost may be a little more than half of that.

Before you start investing a lot of time and money into planning and preparation, test your family’s walking ability. You should be able to walk together at an average of at least three kilometers per hour on flat ground, for multiple hours. We found that this was quite attainable for our children, especially if we held hands. Once that has been assertained, you can be sure that completing the hike is a possibility.

Dates

The dates of your hike will probably be shaped by your normal work and school constraints. With children in France, you have several two-week holidays which are perfect for short hiking trips, in addition to the longer summer break. We did our hike during the spring vacation in mid-April. I recommend this period if your school vacation is not in early April, as it is less crowded on the Normandy coast. Being the beginning of the hiking season in this region, it can get a little chilly at night, and though we did meet some high winds, I was happy that we weren’t exposed to the higher temperatures of summer on our hike.

Travel

When you have decided on your hiking dates, I highly recommend buying train tickets. The GR21 is a hike between two train stations. I recommend starting the hike at Le Tréport and finishing at Le Havre. It’s better to finish your hike in a place with more frequent transportation options, and Le Havre is a big city with many trains. There are other good reasons to start in Le Tréport, such as following the FFRandonée’s Topoguide and saving Étretat for near the end of the hike, but it certainly also makes travel back home after the hike more flexible. If you are coming from Paris like us, it is easy to get to Le Tréport, with just one change in Beauvais. The train home from Le Havre was direct to Saint-Lazare with few stops.

Clothing

When it comes to clothing, it depends a bit on the season, but I recommend bringing rain jackets that also serve to keep warm in case of high winds. That is the heaviest piece of clothing. Otherwise, we were all wearing long sleeves and pants. Since it was spring, we brought some items to keep warm as well, such as a knit cap and sweatshirts. The main issue we had with the weather and temperature was cold winds, so long sleeves and pants were necessities. The children each had an extra layer to ensure they were warm enough, and I feel that they did need that.

Gear

It is useless to give you links to a bunch of gear that won’t be on sale when you read this guide. In addition, I don’t like proposing specific pieces of gear. Instead, I will just give you the basic strategy of any hiking family: share gear. I recommend sharing one four-person tent and one cooking set. The parents carry 35 liter backpacks, and the children carry little daypacks. It is important to have the children participate in some way by having a backpack, but it should be small.

I think the tent is the hardest piece of gear to find. There was only one 4-person tent that I could find at an acceptable weight for hiking (2.8 kilograms), for a decent price (150 euros). I had to have it shipped from a store in the Netherlands that seemed to be the only place that had it in stock. It served us well, and even though it was a little heavy for me to carry by myself, it allowed us to lighten everyone else’s backpacks, which is critical.

After that, most of the gear came from Decathlon. If you are in France, Decathlon is a great box store with some fairly lightweight gear for great prices. The gear we bought was a lot of Quechua (a French branch sold mostly by Decathlon) stuff which was super cheap. All of our backpacks, sleeping pads and iking poles were all shipped to us from Decathlon’s online store. I balanced good prices with lightweight items. Nothing we had was ultralight, it was simply run-of-the-mill box store hiking gear. Our adult backpacks were each 60 euros and less than a kilogram each. The children’s gear was extremely cheap. I highly recommend Decathlon.

For the sleeping gear, normal 3-season sleeping backs which are rated to be comfortable at 5 degrees Celsius should be fine. That was as low as the temperature got at night in April 2024 on the Normandy coast. I wanted to share sleeping pads, but couldn’t find anything affordable. I ended up going with cheap foldable foam sleeping pads, and they were fine.

For cooking, I invested in a large Toaks pot and pan set, and an alcohol stove. Many hikers prefer to use fuel cannisters with gas, and I’m sure that would work fine as well. I just prefer being able to go to refill my fuel at any grocery store if needed. The downside of sharing cooking gear is that it can take a lot longer to cook for four people. I consider this to be a sacrifice worth making, as we have more time in camp with younger children who can’t hike for long hours every day. To compensate, I carried other things for myself to eat that didn’t need to be cooked.

The other things that we brought were two headlamps, a trowel, tissues, a small microfiber towel, phones with charging cables, and the Topoguide. These items were all extremely light, and each more than earned their place in our packs. We really limit extra things, but many small lightweight items are very useful on a hike. Your list may vary, but it will probably be quite similar to ours.

Most importantly for the children, we brought a few things to make the experience fun. Cheap little cameras that they could take pictures with (although they soon found the cameras could play games and we had to limit their playing time). Tiny playing cards were a lightweight option to pass the time in the tent.

Test Hike

About two or three weeks before the real hike, take your family out for a hike and camp together in the tent. This is invaluable experience if you have never camped and hiked together, and even if you have, I would still do it to be sure to be prepared. Our test hike was much more difficult than the GR21 due to months of rain leaving high water and heavy mud along the section of the GR1 that we hiked. We learned what worked for us, how the children liked to hike, and what strategies to use to make the experience fun.

Hiking

When it comes to the actual hike, my advice is to plan well in advance the daily distance and give yourself plenty of time. I meticulously planned stopping points which were close to twenty kilometers each day, allowing us to complete the trail in 11 days. Each day, we tried to find good spots to take long breaks of at least thirty minutes. The only real obstacle to this was strong winds and chilly temperatures which made stopping for long uncomfortable for us. Our children loved playing on the many beach playgrounds found along the trail.

By getting up and starting our hike between 8 and 9 in the morning, we had plenty of time to do twenty kilometers at our own pace, with long breaks included, and arrive at a good spot to camp by dinner time. Some days, we didn’t take long breaks, and ended up finishing our hiking by early afternoon. I still insisted that we stop at the planned point in order to give our children a break and not wear them out.

During the day, we kept our children motivated by feeding them with a steady stream of snacks. In this way, we make hiking more enjoyable by presenting it as an opportunity to eat all the things which are usually more restricted at home. Oreos, candy, lollipops, crackers, and all sorts of snacks were constantly being handed out while we walked.

Camping at the end of the day was the favorite part of hiking for our children. It was important to pick out possible spots ahead of time, as there aren’t too many good spots to stealth camp on the GR21. The trail is constantly near a village or on a road, so the best spots for camping are near the cliffs or near farm fields, if possible. Having one tent for all four of us to share was key. In the tent, the children laughed together and relaxed after hiking. They ate noodles and other snacks, I wrote in my journal, Alex cooked, and we all organized our things. Occasionally we would play a card game, and the children might be allowed to play with their cameras.

The children found things that they enjoyed about the hike as well. Both kids enjoyed looking for the next blaze and calling them out, especially Daniel. Following the path of the trail with its turns, and looking forward to the next milestone were simple ways that our children stayed engaged.

For myself, planning everything for my family kept me busy. There weren’t a lot of great opportunities to filter water from a good source, so I planned where to buy large bottles and how far they needed to last until the next opportunity to refill. I was able to balance our nights camping in the tent with a few nights in rented rooms in town. Dieppe, Fécamp, and Le Havre were the places we paid to sleep in comfortable beds and relax for a night in town. I recommend these town stops, because it gives opportunities to take more time in the cities to wash clothing and resupply.

Together, we supported each other through the various little challenges of thru-hiking, and we got a first taste of hiking together in France. It was a memorable experience for all of us, and it introduced the idea of doing more hikes together. I hope that the GR21 can be that for other families looking to get into hiking together as well.

The map reveals some interesting trivia. Things like, the Southwest of France which is now missing a Ligue 1 team since Bordeaux, the ninth most populous city in France, was relegated to Ligue 2. Looking at the map with all the teams on it, the entirety of France is quite full, except for the Empty Diagonal, which is quite noticeable in its lack of teams.

I find it interesting to see which little towns have a team in the fifth division, or which cities don’t have any teams at all, such as Aix-en-Provence. As I created the map for the teams in the Championnat National 3, the fifth division of French football, I came across teams whose logos were difficult to find, and often had little information online, Facebook being sometimes their official channel of communication.

Some day perhaps I will create a simple tool which allows me to input a location and calculate the nearest team. Even better, I could give multiple options, and give more weight to teams in better leagues. I would be interested in encouraging support for more local teams in the lower levels of French football by allowing people to search for teams close to them.

When I say that a branch split off the trunk, that is technically correct. However, the branch in question has a diameter larger than many people, and even the extremities of the branch ten yards from the trunk is over a foot thick. There must be about ten different secondary branches, each of significant size and length.

The branch fell onto other smaller trees in the area both on our property and on the other side of the fence where the train tracks are. Thankfully, the branch was far from the tracks and there was no issue there. The smaller trees bent but did not break, and in between the part of the branch still attached to the trunk and the support of these other trees, the gigantic oak branch never actually reached the ground. This posed quite a problem for me, a software engineer with little landscaping experience and no chainsaw.

I let the branch sit for about half a year while I mourned the loss of part of our beautiful oak tree. I then got to work with my little hand saw, and starting removing branches bit by bit. Always making sure to stay out of harm’s way, I slowly reduced the weight strain on the supporting trees and removed many of the outlying branches. Dutifully sawing them into firewood-sized bits, they were stored in the basement in a growing pile. I attacked the tree almost every day for a couple weeks, and as I got rid of more and more wood, I kept close eye on the gigantic oak branch.

Though I had to slide under our fence and cut from the property belonging to the train tracks, I have finally succeeded in bringing this behemoth to the ground. When I finally cut the final big branch supporting the weight, the fallen oak branch completed its six-month journey to the ground, and split completely from the trunk. I was very relieved to have the branch on the ground, instead of looming in the air where it was a real safety hazard. It would have surely been a fatal accident had it fallen on someone.

I am really proud of my work on the tree, having avoided the expense and trouble of hiring a crew to deal with this thing, and having done the whole project with a handsaw. I estimate I spent a total of twenty hours working on it, sawing bits off the tree, then sawing the bits into smaller bits for storage in the basement. Now all that is left is the large branch on the ground. I think I will leave it there for awhile. I’ve had enough of sawing for quite awhile.