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Welcome to the “Georgia Wasp…”

This blog is modeled on the Carolina Israelite. That was an old-time newspaper – more like a personal newsletter – written and published by Harry Golden. Back in the 1950s, people called Harry a “voice of sanity amid the braying of jackals.” (For his work on the Israelite.)

That’s now my goal as well. To be a “voice of sanity amid the braying of jackals.”

For more on the blog-name connection, see the notes below.

In the meantime:

September 26, 2026 – My last three posts – starting with Preview of Holland’s GR5 – talked about what I thought might happen on the hike I just finished. (On September 14.) The next few posts will talk about what actually happened on the hike; what I actually went through.

To start off, I flew from Atlanta to Amsterdam on August 16 and arrived the morning of the 17th. On Wednesday, August 19, I met up with my brother Tom and his wife Carol. We took the train to Hook van Holland on Saturday the 22d and started hiking the next day. All told we spent 24 days on the trail, 21 hiking with three days off, spaced out. (We dipped down into Belgium for 14 days and emerged back in Holland the last day of the hike, September 14th in Maastricht.)

I’ll have more detail in later posts, but I’ll start this one with some general observations and end it with a vignette-example of one adventure we experienced. (An “Ordeal and Triumph?”)

For starters, I prefer point-to-point hiking. (“Git thar fustest.”) That’s based on what I learned in 8th-grade math; that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?

That’s also based on the genes I inherited from my father. He served in the Army Air Corps in World War Two as a navigator. His told the pilot where to go, literally. He decided the direction of the flight, often on long hauls over huge expanses of water like the Pacific Ocean. In doing so he earned the nickname “Pinpoint,” mostly because he accurately calculated that straight-line short distance to the plane’s final destination. (Often a tiny smidge of an atoll surrounded by nothing but blue; “alone, alone on a wide, wide sea.”)

But trying to follow the GR5 wasn’t like that. (“GR” stands for grande randonnée in French. “5” runs from Hook of Holland on the North Sea all the way down to Nice on the Mediterranean. 1,420 miles, of which we hiked 140 or so.) And at least on the part we hiked it “wandered to and fro.” It meandered; it often had us follow a winding, turning path. Too often it seemed to move aimlessly and idly, without any apparent fixed direction. (Or any sense of the right direction.) And too often this happened at the end of a long day when all I wanted to do was get to the lodging, ditch the 20-pound pack and get to that first icy-cold beer.

A prime example: Our final day’s hike from Lanaken in Belgium to just across the border back into Holland. Google Maps said should have been nice and short, maybe six miles. But once we crossed over the border and got to the outskirts of Maastricht, the GR5 swung way northeast, away from where we would end up. So on this last afternoon – like many other days on the trail I found myself asking – “Why the heck are we moving away from the lodging?”

Which brings up another note: For the first time ever on one of these Camino hikes – which I define as: “at the end of each day you look forward to a warm bed, hot shower and a cold beer” – I had access to the internet. Before I left my travel partner (to England in May 2025 and Ireland in May 2026) hooked me up with Roamless Global eSIM. And it worked, for a very reasonable price. For the first time ever I didn’t have to rely on someone else. (At the end of most days in all previous hikes I found myself wondering, “Where the hell is this place?”)

The downside? For the first time ever I could see where the night’s lodging was, but more to the point I could tell exactly when and where we were heading away from that final destination. That in itself led to some aggravating moments, but on balance I’d rather know than not.

I’ll have more in future posts, but now for that vignette of one adventure we experienced.

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After five days hiking we got to our place in Herkingen on Thursday, August 27. Then came the first of our three days off: A Friday without having to hike eight hours while lugging a 20-pound pack. Plus we got to sleep in the same bed for two nights in a row. Then on Saturday, August 29, we left Herkingen and headed for Tholen. The problem? It was 20 miles to Tholen, way beyond our capacity. So we came up with a combined operation of sorts. (In the military sense such an operation is “conducted by forces of two or more allied nations acting together for the accomplishment of a common strategy,” a concept I’ll explore in future posts.) 

We planned to start off by taking a bus from Herkingen to Dirksland and then to Oude-Tonge. (The name means “old headland.”) That would leave a do-able 9.2 mile hike to Sint Philipsland. Once we got there we could take another bus to the apartment reserved in Tholen. It was a beautiful plan, but I’m getting ahead of myself. (Except to note that past “best laid plans o’ mice and men” that’s come up quite often in past Camino hikes.)

The day started off well, except that once we got to Oude-Tonge via bus we found out that most cafes or restaurants didn’t open until noon. We finally found the Hotel Restaurant Lely, and carbed up for the hike ahead. I got a coffee and apple pie with whipped cream, then we hit the trail. Heading out of Oude-Tonge the day was sunny and beautiful. In due course we started hiking on a long causeway, the N59, with lots of sparkling blue water on both sides. In time we turned south on another long causeway, the N257. (I took a picture for Facebook fans and had a pop quiz: “Can you count how many newfangled windmills are in this picture?”)

It sounds easy in a sentence or two, but what I remember was hour after hour of walking. (“And we kept walking, and kept walking. And noted the darkening clouds.”) Which happened a lot on the GR5 we saw; lots of days with clouds darkening the sky. Meanwhile, by mid-afternoon it had been a long stretch since that apple pie and coffee in Oude-Tonge. (Which also happened a lot on our hike; no place to stop and refresh.) Finally – via my Roamless access to Google Maps – we found a place called “Donny op de Dam.” It was a one-man, not-in-a-hurry place that specialized in barbecue. I got what turned out to be a huge barbecue chicken sandwich. I planned to save half for dinner, but it was so good I scarfed it down. And we still had a ways to go.

We hit the trail again, and then at 2:20 the rains hit. Not a drenching rain, but it was persistent enough to soak us good. Things looked bleak. Finally we reached the Rijksweg and turned into the way to Sint Phillipsland. I thought to myself, “Relief in the form of a bus to Tholen is only moments away.” Except that when we got there, we learned that the place was way more isolated than any other place we’d been in those seven prior Camino hikes, (Starting back in 2017.) In brief: “No busses until Monday morning, no taxi service, no Uber, NOTHING!”

The only place open was the Spar market in town. We dropped our packs in an out-of-the-way corner with an indoor picnic table and pondered our dilemma. As the others settled in I asked the lady manager if they sold beer. She said yes, but that I couldn’t drink it there. “We’re not a cafe.” It was late Saturday afternoon and there was no way to transport to Tholen until Monday morning – unless we hiked the remaining nine miles, most of it in the dark.

We were in dire straits, almost ready to panic.

I got out my phone and texted my partner back home. (Which I did a lot on the hike, sometimes while hiking on the trail itself; making notes for future reference, including writing out this post.”) That late Saturday afternoon I wrote, ” “Sint Philipsland is a podunk town. No busses until Monday morning, no real taxis or Uber. We’re screwed.” I got a frappuccino and a donut, then returned to the table. Our conversation turned to our plight, not wanting to keep hiking another nine miles to Tholen at 4:00 in the afternoon, already all soggy and wet.

I forget exactly what happened next, but somehow the lady manager deduced our situation – maybe because I asked about the beer? – and managed to find a customer who spoke English. (“As if by magic a nice young dark-haired mommy appeared who spoke English.”) She wore faded blue jeans and at one point had to go after her eight-year-old daughter. (She was struggling out the front door, carry a huge case of beer, presumably to the lady’s car.) Once she got that settled the dark-haired beauty patiently tried to find ways to help us get to Tholen. (I sat to her right as she talked with Tom and Carol sitting across from us.)

Eventually I asked if she knew anyone who could give us a ride to Tholen – we were pretty desperate at that point in the late afternoon. She pondered that a few minutes and finally said to give her five minutes to go talk to her son at home, then she could give us a ride. She went out the door and drove off, which led to a lot of wondering-what-to-do-if-she-didn’t-come-back five or six minutes. But she did come back, with her dad in the front seat, and gave us a ride directly to our lodging in Tholen, with our swollen soggy feet and all.

Once we got to the front door of our lodging, Tom gave the lady a 50 Euro note. She protested, saying that was way too much, but actually he was glad to get rid of that big bill. He’d been trying to break it for days. (That’s one downside of getting a lot of Euros from a bank or ATM. Most places in Europe won’t break such a large bill, so near the end of the trip when I needed cash I just got 40 Euros. There was a hefty eight-Euro fee but I felt it was worth it.)

But I digress, which I am wont to do. It remains only to say, “I hope that dark-haired saintly beauty has or finds her perfect soul mate, and peoples the earth with her progeny. The world would be ever so much nicer with more people like her. And add, “That’s one reason we keep doing these long-distance hikes in a strange country. Finding a surprise in how nice some people can be. Tomorrow we hike to Bergen op Zoom. Who knows what other surprises await?

And that’s how we got to Tholen, just one of the many adventures we found on the GR5.

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The upper image is courtesy of “cafe karpershoek amsterdam” Images. See also Café Karpershoek | Historic Amsterdam Bar | RB Horeca. The oldest pub in the city “was built directly at the harbour of Amsterdam in 1606 and used to be an inn for sailors and tradesmen.”

The quote “alone on a wide, wide sea” refers to the poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Re: “9.2 mile hike.” That was Tom’s calculation. Google said different.

The full link: Smashburgers & BBQ Foodtruck in Bruinisse | Donny op de Dam.

Re: “Best laid plans.” See Best Laid Plans – Origin & Meaning – GRAMMARIST, noting the Robert Burns poem with the line, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” The rest of the thought, “An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promised joy.” The expression “conveys that one should not expect things to always turn out as planned.” See also my December 2023 post My second day in Paris (etc.) and two others under “best laid plans” in the search engine above right.

The lower photo is courtesy of “sint phillipsland belgium” Images, with a page that added: “The current village of Sint Philipsland was rebuilt in the 17th century after the village’s predecessor disappeared into the waves due to a storm surge. Consequently, it is the youngest settlement in the municipality of Tholen.”

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Re:  The Israelite.  Harry Golden grew up in the Jewish ghetto of New York City, but eventually moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.  Thus the “Carolina Israelite.”  I on the other hand am a “classic 74-year-old “WASP” – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – and live in north Georgia.  Thus the “Georgia Wasp.”    

Anyway, in North Carolina Harry wrote and published the “israelite” from the 1940s through the 1960s.  He was a “cigar-smoking, bourbon-loving raconteur.”  (He told good stories.) That also means if he was around today, the “Israelite would be done as a blog.”  But what made Harry special was his positive outlook on life.  As he got older but didn’t turn sour, like many do today.  He still got a kick out of life.  For more on the blog-name connection, see “Wasp” and/or The blog.

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