A Man, a Dog, a Walk Around the World - In 2015, Tom Turcich set out to circumnavigate the globe by foot. He has been walking ever since.
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There are many ways to walk. One may stride or stroll. 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.
Yet there are also more determined, more decisive forms of traveling on foot—hiking, trekking, tramping, and trooping, among them. These convey a sense of purpose or of place, the elements that lend structure and meaning, even if mundane, to the path ahead. One might commute long stretches of concrete, going city block after city block, only to reach an endpoint as ordinary as the office. 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. But no matter where one walks, each journey unfolds in fundamentally the same way: one foot after the other, one step at a time.
Tom Turcich, on a mission to circumnavigate the world by foot, has walked all of these ways. 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. He has celebrated the nuptials of strangers in Turkey and waited out a global pandemic in Azerbaijan, returning to the U.S. multiple times along the way, for recovery following his illness, for rest, for visas, and for a COVID vaccine. What he once expected to be a continuous five-year journey will be a piecemeal seven-year one. 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. 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. But there’s no question they will finish. That, he assures us.
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https://www.afar.com/magazine/tom-tu...=pocket-newtab