I wrote about my sabbatical plan here 4 months ago: https://nowuh.com/landing-on-a-sabbatical-plan
Since then I've been busy preparing and getting married. This Saturday, 6 days away as of me typing this, I will set off on my walk to Montreal. I've gone through different gear (hello new backpack and boots) including things I bought for this trip that I now realize I won't use and learned a lot about how to keep my feet mostly free of blisters.
If all goes according to plan, I should be walking into Montreal on September 1st.
In planning this I've gone through a ton of refinement. I did many practice walks with and without my backpack. I learned that I am able to go on a hike right after camping. I learned that 55km is my absolute max I can walk in one day but I'll sacrifice the next day. I also learned that the route from Toronto to Montreal really isn't made for people to walk it.
One concession I've made is that busses are okay to use. When possible, I'll take a city bus to cross a town. This will come up in Port Hope to Coburg and crossing Kingston. Because the lodging options are a bit difficult, I did have to prebook everything to make sure I'm not leaving myself stranded. There may come a day I need to skip a hiking day just for my physical safety and for the Toronto-Kingston leg, I can mostly rely on the Maple Bus to do that. I'd like to avoid that bailout option if possible.
In total, I should be walking around 513km with around 40km being aided by bus. This is both to provide myself a bit of a break and because hotel/camping options aren't always available in the cadence I need. Another way I could have avoided this is to add a couple days to my trip, but I know I'll need time to recover within my sabbatical before returning to work.
Another weird thing I'm doing with this is I'm not technically starting in Toronto. I'll actually be walking from the town of Bowmanville to Montreal. To condition myself from this trip, I've been walking the portion of Toronto to Bowmanville in several chunks.
When hiking a long journey like this it's important to ramp yourself up. So those 5-10km hikes should help with the conditioning. On August 15th, the only thing that should be left is CN Tower to Danforth GO. So I plan to walk that segment, jump on the GO train, then GO bus and then continue walking until I hit Newcastle to end day 1.
This coming week, I'll wrap the last two middle segments I have left (Guildwood to Rouge and Rouge to Pickering) and then start doing more 15-20km walks to continue ramping things up.