The past week or two, I had a different idea. What if part of this exploration were a long hike rather than a long bike ride? What would be similar and what would be different?

So first thing was think of what I meant by a long walk. I thought about three different possibilities.

• One of the classic ones is something like the Appalachian Trail. Away from roads, sometimes remote and rugged. Varying gaps of distance and occasional needs to get supply caches. An established tradition with guidebooks and different accounts. Definite starting times and time windows to avoid snows or severe weather. I didn’t go too far down the AT idea. Rugged trail is fine and even bouldering, but not as much into jumping from rock to rock with a heavy pack on my back as I was at age 15. I also briefly thought of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Looking further, this seems slightly more extreme than AT, with a key item is getting the trudging through snow right depending on year and season. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) actually seemed closest to what might make sense there
• Second choice would be to just set off across country on roads. As an example, in 2018 I had cycled from Brownsville to the Canadian border mostly following US 83. What would it be like walking that instead? Some things seemed to fit in similar fashion. Small towns to visit and generally friendly people. However, walking 15-20 miles per day meant what I covered in one day of cycling could be 3-4 days of walking. Being more on roads meant the possibility of some form of cart instead of everything on my back. Walking along the road would probably be OK most places, there was often a shoulder, but a few more spots of caution since on a bike I could watch my rear view mirror. The seasons gave me a little more leeway.
• Third choice I stumbled on with web searches was the American Discovery Trail (ADT), a roughly organized route from Delaware to San Francisco that picked off-road alternatives where it could. Seemed intriguing, so I ordered a PDF of one of the maps to see at what level these were at. I saw a guide less-developed than the Adventure Cycling materials, but probably OK when paired with a cell phone and an off-line mapping application like Maps.ME. Seemed intriguing.

After that first pass, I wanted to get more of a sense of the ADT. It is longer than a more direct walk e.g. 4800 miles vs perhaps 3600 miles. At 20 miles per day averaged out, would be eight or more months. So I found an interesting book by Nate Damm that described his account walking across America in 2011 roughly starting with the ADT. Nate’s TED talk

Nate started carrying a backpack and part way through, switched over to pushing a stroller. The stroller definitely went easier and allowed him to carry more than he could on his back. If it weren’t for that load, it seemed like the stroller made him slightly more into the road and having to watch more. On some occasions, someone would help him by jumping his stuff ahead so he could walk less loaded. On those occasions he was back to a backpack.

Reading Nate’s account, there were two big differences that stood out if I compared things to a bike ride. The first was that finding accommodations becomes more difficult at least at the margins. He was on a tighter budget and mostly camped, whereas I’ve been willing to pay for more inexpensive motels. This gave Nate some more people-experiences on finding that accommodation. Some of those are the classic, people are good, kind and helpful experiences – but some were a bit tougher. Also with only a ~15-20 mile gap, he would get to places with limited choices.

The second difference was Nate’s occasional descriptions of being on the road with traffic. Now I am sure he highlighted the more stressful parts and a lot was fine with a reasonable shoulder. However sense I got was that walking with a stroller meant walking facing traffic and that oncoming cars were less willing to move over to give him room. I’ve had occasions on my cycle trips where I have a lot of higher speed traffic and not much shoulder. Routes in MS and MO come to mind. On those occasions I also found myself looking for an alternative if I could, but while I needed to cope, riding and watching my mirror. The sense I got was for Nate this was a more frequent occasion.

Nate’s trip was fun to read, particularly parts where he traveled some of the same routes that I had on bicycle e.g. US 50 across Nevada.

However, overall it made me less excited about doing a long walk instead of a long bike ride, than I had before reading his book. Mostly because (a) I got the sense I’d still get a lot of the detailed experiences if I was traveling 3-4x as muich per day (b) camping in a lot of un-designated places as a norm rather than exception wasn’t as interesting and (c) traffic also a bit more stressful.