TL;DR 5 Sentence Summary - The Man Who Went on a Hike and Never Stopped

On the appointed day, my sister and I drove south-east from Houston, eyes peeled for a walker by the side of the road. As we passed a place on the map called Alligator Hole Marsh, we spotted him: a white apparition on the far side of the highway, walking upstream against the traffic.

In 1998, at the age of 60, he decided to set out on his first "Odyssey", a 4,400 walk from Florida to Cap Gaspé in Quebec, along a sketchy agglomeration of trails, roads, and a few pathless wilderness areas.

After reaching the trail's end, he returned to the south and, in a blissful denouement, walked another 178 miles from a town near Miami down to the Florida Keys, where he settled into "a mood of total and absolute, perfect contentment, most near nirvana".

"As if with each step," he wrote, "These burdens were slowly but surely being drained from my body, down to the treadway beneath my feet and onto the path behind me." Three days I walked with Eberhart, through swampland and farmland and urban wasteland.

At his age, after all he had experienced, it amazed me that he could hike at all.

Reminds me of Forrest Gump.

Source: Guardian