Zonza, Corsica —

Someone out there has to be asking why a blog about walking in Europe is spending so much time talking about road conditions. Here’s the scoop. Somewhere down the road (excuse the pun), we hope to distill the essence of Corsica into a week of tranquil walking, spectacular scenery, pungent cheeses and personal interactions with the locals.

In a reverse of the adage that one must crawl before they can walk, in our case we have to drive before we can walk. We call it The Sweep. In the weeks leading up to our lovely ferry departure we scoured maps, web pages and guidebooks trying to form a concise strategy for a discovery of Corsica. From the time we got off the boat, that strategy was pretty much stood on its head. As far as I’m concerned, that is the beauty of The Sweep. Preconceptions fall away and are replaced with stark reality. Must sees become must avoids. Often, areas we have never heard of become our favorite places to return to time and again.

Clients often ask: “How in the world did you find this place?” The answer is by getting lost a few hundred times, asking for help a few hundred times and driving more than a few hundred miles. God I love this job.