My wife, Sigrid, and I are ardent road trippers. But over the years, we’ve often talked about seeing the world more slowly, ditching highways for cross-country footpaths such as the Transcaucasian Trail in Georgia or England’s Coast to Coast Walk. We’re more realists than romantics, though, so we always punted the idea. Who could predict how our legs would fare? Or our marriage? The trips remained perpetually relegated to the “someday” file, along with piloting a hovercraft.
Then a pair of books about epic walks was published this spring. Neil King Jr.’s American Ramble, an ecstatic recounting of a 330-mile perambulation from Washington, DC, to Manhattan, made me realize I could pursue an itinerary without venturing as far as the Caucasus. And Walking With Sam, Andrew McCarthy’s sentimental tale of his 500‑mile pilgrimage along Spain’s Camino de Santiago with his teenage son, made me think walking for days could be a bonding experience, rather than the opposite. So the idea took hold again.