Trek, sweat and tears

This autobiographical travel novel is an honest and open story that chronicles the author's journey along Europe's most difficult trek, the Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne.

She set out on her 880-kilometre pilgrimage across the wild mountains without sufficient experience and with a man she barely knew, driven by complex life motives dominated by love, disappointment from unfulfilled expectations, and the need to come to terms with a new fate and dreams forever lost. However, her desire for a spiritual catharsis threw her into a difficult ordeal, in which she had to face risky mountain terrain, complicated relationships with her companion Kamil, and even fear for her life. In the hard toil of constant walking in remote mountains, at the very bottom of feelings of hopelessness and confusion, she finally found the desired way forward for her life, but a completely different one than she had imagined.

The book unfolds in three storylines, with the crossing of the Pyrenees being just one of them, their framework. The second theme, which appears in the book in retrospect, is the author's professional life. The uncertainty of the musician's profession, accompanied by the search for stable employment and the effort to establish herself, kept her on the edge of financial self-sufficiency for many years. Together with love and spurned desires, which form the third thematic line of the book, a complex picture emerges of the motives that prompted her to take the unpredictable journey across the Pyrenees.