When good trails go bad

An appeal of following a trail is that you only ever have two choices: continue ahead, or turn back.¹

In practice, that hasn’t been the case with the E5 so far. Sure, those are the two main choices, but also:

• How far do I go off-trail to find a place to stay?²
• What do I do when the trail veers significantly from what’s on my map? (As a rule, I follow it.)
• What do I do when I’m following the marked trail, not the map, and I lose it? (I try to go the smartest way from where I am, and usually that turns out to have been the trail all along.)
• What do I do when I’m following the marked trail, and it goes in an obviously-stupid direction, and I have a reservation at a place to stay “ahead” near what I thought (based on the map) was the actual trail?

The last happened to me on the trail from Saint-Rivoal to near Huelgoat. It detoured from the map up to the top of Ménez-Mikel, which, fine, I didn’t exactly want to make the climb, but there was a pretty chapel up there.

I expected the trail to continue more or less east, but there were half-hearted markings taking it west-northwest. I followed these for 20 minutes before giving up, turning back, and following the old route. There were distinct “the GR is not this way” marks, for a while … but then I started to see marks again — left over, or still correct? By the time I reached my destination, I’m convinced I was back on the modern trail again. I still have no idea exactly where it was supposed to go.

At the start of this project, I thought that would be important: walk every foot of the trail, no matter what. Now? I kind of don’t care about the trail going in a stupid direction.