

#Year walk lore portable
On the day before his 26th birthday, he departed, carrying with him a sleeping bag and tent, a portable cookstove, a Leatherman knife, a battery pack, a few changes of clothing, some food, and some water, packed into a cart that he pushed ahead of him and a bag he strapped onto his back. He threw a fundraiser and held a press conference, ultimately landing himself a sponsor that agreed to financially back him if he would promote them on his gear, website, and social media accounts. His way of traveling, he decided, would be to walk.
#Year walk lore full
He considered what makes for a full life, a fulfilled life. He went to and graduated from university with a degree in philosophy he worked and lived with his parents while he paid off student loans and saved up money.
#Year walk lore how to
He read widely, scouring travel sites and researching where to go and how to get there. And for another, he didn’t have the slightest idea of what “seeing the world” actually meant to him or even how to begin to conceptualize it. For one thing, his bank account totaled less than $1,000. Of course, as a high school student who’d never been away from his family home for more than a few weeks, Turcich wasn’t prepared to set off right away. And the thing he decided he would do was see the world-not just on a fleeting, greatest-hits style vacation, but as a sustained lifestyle, with all its ups and downs. For Turcich, that moment came when he was 17, when his close friend died at age 16. In most everyone’s existence, there comes an experience so profound that it fractures their life into two-the time before and the time after-and at the faultline in between is the moment they decided they would do something. But there’s no question they will finish. at least once more before they finish in order to avoid winter in Mongolia and being blocked from the border of Australia, which is still closed to travelers. Currently in Kyrgyzstan, with 39 countries and 19,000 miles behind them, Turcich and Savannah still have a few countries and a few thousand miles to go, and they’ll likely return to the U.S. What he once expected to be a continuous five-year journey will be a piecemeal seven-year one. multiple times along the way, for recovery following his illness, for rest, for visas, and for a COVID vaccine. He has celebrated the nuptials of strangers in Turkey and waited out a global pandemic in Azerbaijan, returning to the U.S. Since leaving his home in New Jersey in April 2015, the 32-year-old has rescued a puppy named Lulu in Texas whom he now calls Savannah, been held up at knifepoint in Panama, and halted by life-threatening sickness in Scotland. Tom Turcich, on a mission to circumnavigate the world by foot, has walked all of these ways. Other times, walking is nothing to rejoice in it’s only an arduous trudge. One moment might feel like a cake walk or a walk in the park, so to say, or like you’re walking on air, a cloud, or a dream-or any number of the optimistic maxims that have made their way into many a pop song. The steps come easier on some days than on others.

But no matter where one walks, each journey unfolds in fundamentally the same way: one foot after the other, one step at a time. Or one might traverse, on something like a spiritual pilgrimage, a distance deemed to be iconic, say the height of Mount Everest or the length of the Great Wall. One might commute long stretches of concrete, going city block after city block, only to reach an endpoint as ordinary as the office.

These convey a sense of purpose or of place, the elements that lend structure and meaning, even if mundane, to the path ahead. Yet there are also more determined, more decisive forms of traveling on foot-hiking, trekking, tramping, and trooping, among them. Or amble, ramble, mosey, or wander-all of which imply a certain leisurely aimlessness when, bestowed with the grand luxuries of time and of money, there is nowhere in particular to be and nothing in particular to do.
#Year walk lore professional
4/2/15 Living the dream! Setting out! I’m officially a professional explorer.
