Early on in the walk, I made up my mind that the walk would be done without getting in a car. I even thought of the whole, “what if I take a ride somewhere and get dropped back off where I was picked up” thus, not losing any mileage.
At the time I thought, “no, if there’s shelter or anything cool happening nearby, I’ll walk there.”
What happened, though, was instead of walking to the thing I wanted to get to, I just wouldn’t go. Deciding, instead, to stay put either because I was already tired from walking all day, or not being able to justify losing the mileage going off-route to see the site or get to people’s homes to stay.
My big regret so far in the trip is the day I was within an hour’s drive of the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it before and I just so happened to be talking to a guy in a coffee shop. He was headed up and asked if I wanted to go with him. “I’ll bring you back here afterward, so you stay on track.”
I turned him down out of loyalty to my self-imposed rule of not taking rides under any circumstances.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m missing out on quite a bit that the walk has to offer if I stay within a few hundred feet of what Google Maps tells me is the quickest route. There are a lot of stories to be told off the beaten path and I think the new outlook will prove to be the right one for me. I will still trek, by foot, the 3,035 miles from LA to Boston. I just won’t be scared anymore to ride out with friends and strangers to see the places I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment