When Adeline Hallot’s van broke down on a French highway, crawling at 30 km/h in a 130 km/h zone, she faced a choice: spend her last euros on repairs, or sell everything and start walking to Spain. She chose the road—with two dogs, a cat, and a homemade cart that got stuck on apple-sized rocks.
“I could have fixed my van but it was going to be too expensive,” she said. “So I sold everything I had, loaded my cart and started walking. I only got two kilometers the first day and couldn’t walk any farther.”
Two Kilometers to Freedom
Adeline started her voyage in Saint-Pal-de-Mons, in central France. It was September, and she was walking into winter with about 50 kilos—over 100 pounds—of gear strapped to her cart. Most of that weight was food for her traveling companions: her border collie Dazou, her wolf dog Aiyana, and her Bengal cat Effie.
“I needed to carry enough food for my animals and me because I was going to travel in places where there wouldn’t be stores,” she says. “That meant I needed to carry two weeks’ worth of food with me.”
The cart attached to a harness around her waist. She wasn’t sure where she was going aside from “toward Spain.” She didn’t have much money. The cart was so heavy it got hung up on rocks no larger than apples.
“I wanted to go 2,000 kilometers to Spain,” she says. “But I couldn’t even go more than one kilometer because my cart kept getting stuck on rocks.”
None of that mattered to Adeline. All she could think was, “Okay, I’m walking now.”
The Transformation
Before this trip, Adeline had been battling Lyme disease and crippling sciatica. She had no energy. She’d given up her apartment two years before and was living in her van, traveling around Europe with her two dogs and cat. When the van’s brakes failed on the way to visit friends, the mechanic told her repairs would take weeks and cost more than she had.
“I always wanted to go to Spain to recover my health,” she says. “And I thought, ‘I might as well go now.’”
So she acquired a cart, some camping gear, and hit the road.
“I carried my cat in my backpack,” she says, “and only pulled my cart two kilometers the first day. I woke up the next morning and I was a little sore but I could move much better than the day before.”
This is the point Adeline wants to emphasize. “That was the craziest magical thing about starting up. I went from getting struck by sciatica to muscle sore from walking. But I was moving fine!”
“The next day, I pulled my cart four kilometers, and the first week I went 50 kilometers.”
Throwing Out the Dog Cage
Her cart was too heavy, so Adeline started shedding weight. The dog cage was first to go.
“My dog Aiyana was young, so I’d brought a mesh cage along for her. It only weighed about two kilos. I remember struggling to pull my cart up a steep hill and I was like, ‘I need to get rid of this cage right now.’”
She left it on the side of the trail with a note: “I’m up for adoption. You can take me.”
Adeline gradually settled into a rhythm. “I walked about three hours per day. So it would be 15 kilometers a day, more or less.” Still, life on the road with a cart, two dogs, and a cat took getting used to.
“Everybody looks at you,” she said. “You’ve read about people traveling like this in books and on the internet, but when you look around, nobody else is doing it. And that makes you feel alone, when everyone looks at you.”
The Philosophy of Slow
Adeline followed trails and roads through southern France toward the Pyrenees Mountains. September turned to October. Spain was 1,000 kilometers away. The weather got colder. Instead of sunny skies, she ran into constant rain.
“People would ask me, ‘What are you doing? When did you start? Where are you going?’ At the beginning, they laughed at me like they were thinking, ‘You are never gonna get to Spain! That’s still a thousand kilometers away and you’ll be lucky to get there by next June!’”
Adeline kept walking. As she got closer to Spain, people’s reactions changed. “When I told them how far I’d come, they started to say, ‘Oh wow, you’ve done all of that!’”
She met a man from the Netherlands one day. “He was hiking and had walked 800 kilometers in just a few weeks. He was walking really fast and I was walking really slow because I was pulling my cart. I asked him why he was in such a rush and he said he saw his hike as a challenge.”
“He told me he woke up at 5:00 am and by 6:00 am he was walking. I told him, ‘No, at 5:00 am, I’m sleeping. At 8:00 am I’m waking up and I’m having a coffee. And then at midday I’m starting to walk. And then, at 3:00 pm, I’m camping!’”
“He kept going and we kept in contact. Three weeks after we met, he had finished the trail, and I was still walking almost in the same place.”
Adeline says a regular hiker can cover 20 to 30 kilometers a day. “You can’t go that fast when you’re pulling a cart and leading two dogs and carrying a cat, so I was only doing 10 to 15.”
But speed wasn’t the point. “I didn’t want to get completely exhausted. My goal was not to impress other people with what I did today or how fast I did the trail. I wanted my trip to last for a long time. So my strategy was to go slow and enjoy the trip instead of just rushing.”
The Questions Everyone Asked
People asked Adeline the same questions they ask most solo travelers. “Where did you start from? Where are you going? Why are you doing this?”
But the question she heard most was about fear. “They asked me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of other people? Aren’t you afraid of people attacking you or stealing from you?’”
“Or other people would say, ‘I would be scared of being alone in the woods or to get bored.’ And some people would say, ‘I would be afraid that when I come back to society, I wouldn’t have a career anymore. Or I couldn’t find a job.’”
Adeline says she was afraid on her trip. But it wasn’t about being alone or being attacked. “The thing I was afraid of the most was one of my animals getting hit by a car.” That’s why she stuck to trails and back country as much as possible.
Dreaming of Hoofbeats
As Adeline walked toward Spain, she was already dreaming of her next trip. “That would be a journey walking with a horse, maybe to Norway,” she says. “Or anywhere through some wilderness and mountains. That was a childhood dream.”
She figured this walking journey was preparation for doing it with a horse later. She started reading books about Long Riders—people who have completed continuous saddle journeys of over 1,000 miles. She studied horse breeds that would suit her dream.
“I wanted to find the perfect kind of horse for my future journey,” she says. “Something surefooted that can walk on rocks and live outdoors in cold temperatures. I didn’t need a big tall horse. I wanted something small and agile that could walk on the trails.”
Adeline settled on a Russian breed called a Kabardian. She did more research and found a breeder selling one of these horses. The breeder and his wife were Long Riders, having taken extended journeys with horses in the past. Adeline wasn’t planning on buying a horse yet, but fell in love with one the breeder had.
Then something strange happened.
“I started to dream at night about horses,” she says. “And in one of my dreams, the horses told me I needed to call these people. The horses said, ‘Just call. It’s easy. Just do it.’”
A Horse Named Gezi
Adeline contacted the breeder. The horse was young but would make a good traveling horse, the breeder said. Traveling by cart with two dogs and a cat made spontaneous road trips hard, but Adeline found someone to transport her cart and menagerie so she could visit the breeder.
In the end, she bought the horse for 2,000 euros—all the money she had.
The horse joined Adeline and her dogs and cat on their walking journey. Because she was still young, Adeline didn’t make her carry anything. “She just walked with the rest of the team.” Together, Adeline’s growing troupe continued heading south toward Spain.
“It was like magic,” Adeline says. “I didn’t have a horse and I wanted one. Then, when the time was right, I ended up with one.”
The horse’s name was Gezi, and she would accompany Adeline for the rest of her voyage.
Where Is Sunny Spain?
Adeline finally reached the Pyrenees Mountains. Winter weather was setting in. Because she’d made a detour to buy a horse, she wasn’t on the Mediterranean side of the mountain range, where it would have been warmer. Instead, she found herself on the Atlantic side—much colder and wetter.
“My first night on the road with Gezi, I woke up and it was raining and snowing. I ended up crying inside my soaked and freezing tent that night.”
She and her dogs, cat, and horse forged ahead into the wintry weather. “It contrasted with the beauty of the scenery,” she says. “But I was fed up with fighting the rain, mud, cold, snow every single day since the first day I set off with Gezi. I kept thinking, ‘Where is sunny Spain?’”
“The cart kept turning over on the trail,” she says. “Because it was attached to my waist by a strap, every time it turned over, it hurt my back. Finally, one day, it turned over and one of the wheels broke. There was no way I could go on so I had to stop and try to fix it. I didn’t have any tools but luckily I was close to a village where I could get some help.”
Adeline set up camp in a field outside Sangüesa and found someone to help her fix her cart. The winter weather got worse. It never stopped raining and snowing.
“I had to go see an osteopath to try to heal my sciatica that got very painful again because of those conditions. I had to figure out how I could keep traveling aside from pulling my cart. That was killing my health and making my life on the trail way too hard, and I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer.”
Adeline had walked 500 kilometers from central France, pulling her cart through rain and snow, across rocky trails that challenged every step. She’d gained a horse, shed her sciatica, and found a rhythm to life on the road. But now, with a broken cart and worsening weather, she faced her most difficult decision yet—one that would transform her from a cart traveler into something else entirely.
What happened next would define the rest of her journey.
To be continued.
How We Met Adeline
My wife Julia and I first heard of Adeline a few years before as she was traveling from France to Spain with her dogs, horses, and cat. She was posting about her trip on social media and we thought what she was doing was great. Julia and Adeline became pen pals and this week, we visited Adeline while we were visiting my brother who lives in France.
Adeline told us all about her voyage, and we also got a chance to meet the animals she traveled with through France and Spain.
Note: Adeline posted as Olsey Leine on social media during her voyage. This post is based on notes, audio recordings, and recollections of Julia’s and my time with Adeline. Here story will feature in a future Travel Grit podcast.
Follow Adeline’s Journey
Adeline is currently living in central France studying agroforestry, building a cabin, and planting a food forest. She plans to give tours on edible weeds.
- Blog: Paws Nomad
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