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Home
- About The World Walk
Writings
Photos
- North America
  - U.S.A.
  - Mexico
  - Guatemala
  - El Salvador
  - Honduras
  - Nicaragua
  - Costa Rica
  - Panama
- South America
  - Colombia
  - Ecuador
  - Perú
  - Chile
  - Argentina
  - Uruguay
- Antarctica
- Europe
  - Iceland
  - U.K.
  - Denmark
  - Germany
  - Belgium
  - France
  - Spain
- Africa
  - Morocco
  - Algeria
- Prints
- 360°
Videos
Speaking
Shop
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Spain

Day 987 - I arrived in Valencia over two months ago thinking I'd be here three weeks. If I'd been staying at a hotel or AirBnb I'd be dead broke. Instead, because of the generosity of a friend, Sav and I had a house in the country we were able to stay at

Day 977 - Savannah and I are waiting on one last package before taking off for Algeria. I ordered a GPS which for the rest of this walk will ping my location to a map every ten minutes. I'm excited to have an exact record of my route and to share my adven

Day 943 - Fairly good summation of my time in Valencia. - #spain

Day 938 - Savannah on one of our many walks through the orange groves. The oranges are ripe right now which means whenever I want a snack all I have to do is walk across the street and pluck a few. I'm definitely waiting for this visa in the right place a

Day 928 - While walking I do my best to avoid cities. Navigating their chaos with Savannah and my cart can be overwhelming. So even though I walked from Copenhagen to Gibraltar, Barcelona is one of the few European cities I've really been able to soak in.

Day 924 - Being a tourist in Barcelona for a bit. - #teampixel #spain

Day 922 - Savannah-girl has been enjoying her downtime in Valencia. We have a nice long break ahead of us while I work on getting a visa for Algeria. - #spain #teampixel

Day 895 - Spain has made for a wonderful adventure, but today Savannah and I head to Morocco! For Savannah this will be continent number four and for me it'll be number five. Excited for the adventure ahead! #Theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 894 - Two days ago, Savannah and I trudged over hill after hill until reaching this reservoir where the road flattened out and followed the shoreline. It was on this road, with sweat dripping from my brows, that we happened upon a group of people clos

Day 893 - The purpose of this walk is to really get to know the world, to feel its scope and patterns underfoot. That means accepting what's laid out in front of me regardless of what it is. I don't hunt down mountains, castles, or blue-green lakes; I sim

Day 892 - The best walking is had in the morning. My legs are fresh, I'm motivated, and there's always a sunrise to watch. Yesterday morning was especially nice, the sun was being covered then reemerging from behind the clouds, making it feel like the sun

Day 891 - We've been blessed with clouds lately, and yesterday it rained for the first time since leaving San Sebastian. We're making good time. In just a few days Sav and I will be boarding a ferry to Morocco where we'll be walking the beautiful Mediterr

Day 880 - In the Andalusia region of Spain houses are generally whitewashed twice a year. The white color keeps the houses cool during the scorching summers and the lime in the whitewash disinfects and repels bugs. The cumulative result is streets like th

Day 879 - Cities are great, so are hotels and cafés and beers in the plaza, but I feel more human in the shade of a tree. In those hours I'm not trying to be anyone. The leaves shift in the wind. The cattle trots over the crunchy earth. The man and the do

Day 878 - A few days back I dropped myself in the shade of a tree and about two hundred dragonflies shot airborne all around me. The buzzing of hundreds of dragonflies resonated in my ears like feedback. My initial reaction was to find a different place t

Day 877 - There was a moment last October, after being in sustained agony for half a year, that the antibiotics began to work and I had a happy thought for the first time in months. I thought in that moment I would back to my positive, normal self in no t

Day 876 - I've had the dream of walking around the world lodged in my head since I was seventeen. It's been an obsession so profound that over time it's become inseparable from my identity. I worked like a dog, saved for years, and aggressively paid down

Day 875 - The first cloud cover in weeks followed me and Savannah all morning. It was actually relaxing to walk, not a struggle against the heat. We took a few breaks, but because I was anxious to take advantage of the good walking the breaks were just lo

Day 874 - I have a delicate relationship with paths like this. For short periods they're good. The cart jostles on their imperfections but that's manageable for a while. Savannah can be off leash. There's quiet, tranquility, a feeling of freedom. But when

Day 873 - The heat is not to be fought. There's no winning against it. A victory one day is paid for the next. It can only be avoided, outmaneuvered. Today and tomorrow will essentially be half-days for me and Savannah. The temperatures will be above 100°

Day 872 - Cathedrals towering between the narrow streets, blooms of flowers grown in the shade, a hilltop castle - Trujillo is the most beautiful town I've passed through in Spain. The truly amazing thing about Trujillo though is that it possesses the sam

Day 871 - If there is any sort of heat Savannah and I won't walk for the few hours around solar noon. This isn't due to the temperature, it's usually hotter after solar noon, but because with the sun at an angle there's shade from the cart for Savannah to

Day 870 - Me and the girl churned out some serious mileage this week. Granted, that's mostly because the land was fenced in and finding a place to camp took until sundown most nights, but still! Savannah took that thorn through the paw as though it were l

Day 869 - If I've stayed in one place for a while I get nervous the morning I leave. But once I'm on the road for a few days I find myself ignoring the hotels I pass and looking forward to the feeling of the wind flowing through my tent in the evening. Th

Day 868 - After two days ascending and descending the Sierra, Savannah and I are back in the lowlands. The temperatures are about ten degrees higher on this side of the mountains, but the humidity dropped by about 50% too, so even though it's 98°F (37°C)

Day 867 - I've camped just about everywhere there is to camp. In the Andes at 15,000 feet my tent walls were frozen solid. In Alabama I laid surrounded by swamp, unable to sleep until four in the morning because of the humidity. In Costa Rica I woke to a

Day 866 - It was a twenty-eight mile day yesterday. There was no reason to stop. We only crossed two towns; one in the morning and another at the end of the day. The middle of the day was occupied walking through some especially beautiful landscape - fiel

Day 865 - After three days of keeping Savannah cooped up in an apartment we're back on the road. Her paw looks good and has held up the twenty-two miles we've walked so far today. The vet in Salamanca took great care of her. Moving south of Salamanca the

Day 863 - I find there are few things as adept as a starry sky in acting as a sort of measuring stick for which to put my life into perspective. However, this two thousand year old Roman bridge had much the same effect. How quickly my body and name will b

Day 862 - Sav and I left Salamanca this morning and after an hour Sav began limping. When I stopped to look at her paw I noticed her fur was matted with blood and a gash had formed between her knuckles. The wound was bad enough that I knew the only thing

Day 861 - It's only been two weeks but I'm sticking to my new plan of taking a day off every week. I'm always glad for the day of rest, but it's oddly a difficult thing for me to do - when I'm in a rhythm walking I want to keep it up. If hadn't stopped I

Day 860 - I've walked through ranches, palm plantations, wind farms, solar farms, bluebells, pineapple fields, beach, jungle, snow, altiplanos, páramos, and even the butterfly migration in Mexico...but the past week was something new - fields upon fields

Family Portrait - 8/12/18 - Frómista, Spain - 10,100 miles walked together. . . . (Also, we're actually in Salamanca and taking the day off tomorrow. This photo was taken a few days back.) . . . #Theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 858 - I've been wanting to experiment with those white frames around my photos for about two years. My favorite follows on Instagram use them, they have a way of creating separation between the viewer and photo so the photo looks more like a print tha

Day 857 - This is certainly one of the coolest places I've stumbled across. I headed to the center of Villalpando looking for a place to eat when suddenly the pavement was overtaken by sand and the road opened to this sand-floor plaza. Spanish flags hung

Day 856 - I'm currently walking miles of farmland. This photo is from a few days back while I was in Castrojeriz. A little further north from where I am now I passed lots of cuevas (caves) which were being used for all sorts of things. The first cueva I s

Day 855 - I'm pretty exhausted today. I drank way too much caffeine yesterday and didn't get a great sleep last night. I'll still force out 35km or so, but right now I'm going to find some shade and fall asleep for awhile... #theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 854 - Yesterday Savannah and I turned off the Camino de Santiago and headed south. I was looking forward to breaking out on a less traveled path, but after just a few hours I had a strange sense of loss. Even though I only said, "Bien Camino" to most

Day 853 - It is a wonder that the town of Castrojeriz thrives as it does - founded twelve-hundred years ago in a dry, harsh landscape, the town consists of little more than nine hundred permanent residents. It's the Camino de Santiago coursing through the

Day 852 - In Perú I took a day off every week. In Spain and beyond I'm going to get back to that. While walking these great distances I tend to see the end of each country as the next checkpoint. I'll put my head down and plow through the mileage, content

Day 851 - When I was home a few months ago an aunt of mine asked for advice on how to overcome fear. Because we were among company I didn't give myself time to think and I gave a knee-jerk answer. But since then I've given the question a lot of thought an

Day 850 - "I spread my wife's ashes along the Camino. She made me promise. She died three months ago. Three years ago she was diagnosed with liver cancer. We went through the state health care system in Germany first, but things weren't moving quickly eno

Day 849 - Nájera - town between the rocks. The proximity of the rock wall reminds me a bit of Purmamarca in Argentina (dig through my photos and see what I mean). I've been having lots of déjà vu lately, maybe because South America was so strongly influen

Day 848 - The worst of the heat has broken. From a high of 100° (38°C) yesterday we're suddenly only reaching a high of 80° (27°C) today. That huge drop in heat allowed Sav and I to sleep in today (until 6:30). During the heat wave we were waking at 5:30

Day 847 - There's a wonderful sensation in spotting one of these villages for the first time in the distance. They're so defined against the landscape that they shine like beacons. A new village crops up every six miles or so. The church spire in the cent

Day 846 - Last October I was on death's doorstep and this March I picked up walking again. In hindsight I didn't give myself remotely enough time to recover. I didn't realize it when I was walking from Copenhagen, through Germany, Belgium, and France, but

Day 845 - In the towns I'm passing loads of backpackers walking the Camino, but after the towns I separate from them as they follow sinuous paths and I follow the roads. Generally I prefer to be far removed from other tourists, however, the infrastructure

Day 844 - There was a beautiful fog coming down from the mountains to Pamplona yesterday. Sav and I didn't pass directly through Pamplona but circled around it. The landscape is dry now and the sun is hard. Sav is handling it like a champ, but I'm not goi

Day 843 - Coming down from the mountains and into the August heat. It'll get up to 95° today but it feels cooler than San Sebastian because there's no humidity. I'll have to figure out the best schedule to walk through this weather. I may start at 5 and o

Day 841 - We're back at it, baby! What a strange and challenging day. The path I planned on taking along the Pyrenees looked much cart-friendlier online than it turned out to be. We summited one peak then I nearly broke my ankles on the narrow, rocky path

Day 839 - The strange dicotomy of the walk - meet wonderful people and leave them. I'm finally finding my crowd in San Sebastian, but I know once this package gets delivered it's back to the road. On this adventure, the only things I can count on are chan

Day 836 - The sun just won't seem to set on San Sebastian. After two weeks of back and forth with customs I finished the import paperwork on Monday, but the package has yet to be shipped from Madrid. I can't wait to get back on the road, but when that'll

Day 830 - Visa in hand, now waiting to hear back from customs about my package of shoes/tent insert/underwear/credit card/GoPro accessories. For a month I kept telling my parents to wait before sending the package because I thought I'd have the visa any d

Day 825 - A swim in the ocean, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Croatia battling valiantly - definitely a good day. #theworldwalk #travel #spain #teampixel

Day 824 - Just a few more sunsets on this spectacular coastline. #Theworldwalk #travel #spain #teampixel

Day 823 - Sorry for the radio silence the past few days. I turned off my phone and took a train a few hundred miles to be with some friends. And though technically I'm not allowed to leave San Sebastian while waiting for my visa, the trip was exactly what

Day 818 - To be honest, this is the least fun I've had while on the walk. I stayed in four other places for a month, Bogotá, Lima, Montevideo, and London. In each of those places I had either family or close friends. Here I only have acquaintances. While

Day 815 - While the rain clouds swell Savannah and I make our way down to the ocean. The leaves are damp from the morning rain. The air is brisk. The sun hasn't been exposed today. When I make it to the ocean I sit in the water for a long while. Savannah

Day 814 - Visa papers have been resubmitted in Spanish. Hopefully I hear back in a decent amount of time. These day hikes are nice, but I miss the adventure and challenge of the road. I want to once again earn a good night sleep. I want to stagger into ne

Day 809 - I finally heard back from the immigration office. I've haven't received the extension yet because I need to resubmit my health insurance in Spanish. I'll get that in on Monday then go from there. In the meantime I'll continue walking this tremen

Day 808 - Nothing like unwinding beside the ocean after a ruff day of napping and walks in park. #theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 807 - Wonderful hike last night. To watch the sunset I returned to a stone peak I discovered a few days earlier. The wind was really kicking but Sav found herself a nook in the stone for a little peace. #theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 805 - Coming from the suburbs of New Jersey I wonder how growing up beside views like this would have changed me. #Theworldwalk #travel #spain #teampixel

Day 803 - From the book I always return to, 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius: "Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself in your way of thinking." #theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 802 - No word from the immigration office yet. My visa application seems to have taken a siesta. Thankfully I have a good place to stay and lots of nearby hikes to keep busy. #Theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 800 - It may not look like it in this photo, but today was the first 80° day I've experienced in Spain. Sav and I did a few hour hike and in the heat I was able to work up a good sweat. There's still no word on my visa extension, so for the time being

Day 799 - Long days are one of the greatest boons for a walker. Long days mean sleeping in isn't punished and finding a place to sleep isn't so pressing. Right now there's still light in San Sebastian until 10:30 or so. #theworldwalk #travel #spain

Day 798 - No word on my visa extension just yet. The immigration office said it would probably take two weeks so I should hear back in a few days. In the meantime I've been practicing Spanish and taking short hikes with Sav. Yesterday we walked a bit of t

Day 796 - That visa extension is feeling more important by the minute... - - - #Theworldwalk #travel #spain #teampixel

Day 791 - My days in San Sebastian have so far consisted of a furious amount of studying Spanish, intermittenly broken up by lots of walks in the park. I love having enough time here to build some habits. It streamlines each day. It makes studying easier

Day 788 - The papers have been submitted. I'll hear back about my visa extension within ten days. Until then I'll be dusting off my Spanish in San Sebastian. I've forgotten so much and the Spanish here has a different accent and is spoken much faster than

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