Wandertrail is organised around three questions that come up before any trip: how much time the walking actually takes, what a day costs once the small items are added, and how to move between two cities without paying for comfort you will not use. Everything on the site hangs off those three, and the pages are written so you can stop reading after the first useful paragraph.
If you have one evening before a flight, read the page for the city you land in first. The guides work in any order, and none of them assumes you have already opened another one on this site, so a single page should be enough to settle the first day.
If you are choosing a walk
Start with the Nakasendo between Magome and Tsumago, which is short, well kept and honest about what the climb costs, then read the Takao to Mt. Jinba ridge when you want a full day with real ascent and a turnaround rule. Both pages give distance, climbing and a realistic pace rather than a mood.
If you are watching the budget
Two pages do most of the work. Osaka street food prices the stalls and sets the hours worth turning up for, while the cash page covers which machines accept a foreign card, what the fees are and how much to carry in the countryside. Between them they usually answer a week of small money questions.
If you are moving between cities
The overnight bus page sets out fares, seat classes and the timetable against the train, and it is written for anyone deciding whether to buy time or buy a morning. Read it before booking anything after a long flight, since the day after a night bus behaves differently from the day after a normal one.
How the pages are built
Each guide opens with the decision in front of you, then the route or the numbers, then what we would change if we did it again. Prices carry the month they were recorded, timings come from a watch or a phone on the ground, and the foot of the page says when the figures were last checked. Where a page links to another page on this site, it is because the two belong together in the same plan.
Pages also say what they do not cover. Where a route really needs a car, the guide says so instead of implying that a bus running twice a day will do, and where a figure is a rough estimate it is labelled as one. That habit is most of the difference between this journal and a page of averages.
How to ask a question
Write to the desk with the guide name, your dates and where you are starting from, and you will get an answer within two business days. Corrections are welcome and welcome first. The About page has the short version of who writes this and how the pages get checked.