September 20, 2025

It’s mid-January now, in 2026. I haven’t sat down and written anything in months, besides a new murder mystery. Blogs here typically are typed up with as little gap between the events and their documentation, the idea being that fresher memories might lead to more vibrant recollection. Half the reason for this blog is to compensate for the frustrating leakiness of my memory, to have a tangible account with high fidelity to my experiences. I hope that, as you read, you are able to forgive any brevity of description or lack of details and that your appetite might be sated by my reflections, which feel like they’ve deepened since the events at hand transpired. This pre-amble goes for the following entry as well. Also, I just read Shantaram and, as so often happens when I write soon after I read something, my tone and style will certainly reflect that of the book’s author, in this case the venerable Gregory David Roberts.

It was in London that the Long Trail caught up with me. The uncomfortable conditions of physical exhaustion, nutritional depletion, emotional burntness, and outright bodily overuse all contributed to a sub-ideal state in which to begin a long chapter of travel. When I left home, I was still behind on my sleep, I’d lost about 10 pounds in as many days, and my left foot ached dully from a strain deep inside that I, frighteningly, didn’t recognize or understand. I’d had about three days at home to sit and be a couch potato before embarking on my next trip. If you haven’t read my post about the Long Trail, the jist is that it was by far the most physically and mentally challenging feat I have ever achieved. Three days wasn’t enough to figure out what that all meant for me, or did to me.

I arrived in London tired, glum, and unsure. I’d planned to spend a few days there, visit a friend of mine doing graduate school there, and begin a hostel-hopping marathon starting in Moldova. I’d made the rough plan a couple months prior, and it was a solid route. An old Soviet sleeper train from Chisinau to Bucharest, a space-age concrete building in the middle of the Bulgarian wilderness called Khadzhi Dimitur, and a booking with an amazing tattoo artist in Sofia that I’d been looking forward to for months. These stops were the spring board of the trip, launching into a meander around Italy and some time picking olives on my Uncle Tony’s olive farm in Campania, on my family’s ancestral land.

Working for Tony was the entire reason for this trip, and really the whole year, and why I’m not in grad school myself right now. I’d visited him a year earlier, with my mother, when I was working remotely. He’d told me that I could come back and help out on his farm (a modest but productive commercial olive oil plantation) for a month or two. The harvest season is October and November. How could I say no? My plan was to work for him in the fall, maybe with a couple of fun-travel stops before and after. I called him this summer, and heard that the harvest was going to be very small- there had been a late frost that killed most of the blossoms. The previous year had had a similar cold snap, but they’d been able to harvest a respectable amount of high-quality olives, though still not as much as usual. When I talked with him, it sounded like this year was much worse. There were so few olives on the trees that it hardly seemed worth it to bring out the harvesting equipment, much less put up your nephew (more of a family friend actually, when you take a close look at the family tree) for a couple of months.

In London, I was overcome with malaise, and a sense of grief for the sense of purpose I’d felt over the summer. I love working in the coffee shop, being a part of the team, contributing to something that feels like what community is supposed to feel like. And I’d had the Long Trail. Preparing for it all summer gave me such a sense of drive and continuity, and completing it was a massive and thrilling test, the culmination of months of hard work. Now, walking along the Thames, I felt the all too familiar wash of the kind of traveler’s guilt that comes when you don’t enjoy yourself, and can’t picture enjoying yourself if things keep going on. This peculiar kind of guilt tosses around words like ungrateful, jaded, and spoiled. But, for better or for worse, I’d felt it before, so I had some practice working through it.

Don’t get me wrong- I had a great time in London. My friend, Gabby, and I walked for miles, from Chelsea to Canary Wharf and Waterloo and more. We caught an amazing show at Shakespeare’s Globe, straddled hemispheres at the Greenwich Mean Time line, and ogled dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. Tate, National Portrait Museum, Herrods, Kew Gardens, Richmond, a tour of a grad school I was considering, Camden Market, and the Gherkin all stand out in my mind. Gosh I love the Gherkin. A huge far right protest made headlines while I was there, and I strolled through their debris strewn about their wake. Keeping my lovely sightseeing company, though, was my sense of uncertainty. Was this the right time to travel? If what I know I need is really just rest, should I just do that?

My flight to Moldova was on a Tuesday evening. That morning I decided to skip the flight and change everything. What I was missing, I decided, was a purpose. What was missing from the hostel-hopping style of trip was the mission, the quest. It’s never pointless to travel and sightsee, but I wanted to be working for something, towards some majestic goal. Besides, it wasn’t me who had planned that first trip. Well it was, but it was the version of my from two months ago. When I read my own blog back, I often feel like I’m reading the words of a completely different person. Maybe my taste changes in grandiose cycles or unpredictable waves, and I’m certainly highly influenced by mood, but I just felt like trapped, following the itinerary of some past version of myself that I was so far from then. I booked a handful more nights in my hostel in London and called my family in Italy to see if they were free the following week.

The new plan: Walk the Camino de Santiago, from Geneva, Switzerland, across France, through Le Puy, and across Spain along the Camino Frances, to Santiago de Compostella. About 1300 miles on foot, I could arrive just in time to fly home for Thanksgiving. It was ambitious, and right on the edge of doable for the time that I had. I was electrified. By far my biggest walk ever, over triple my longest to date (Ireland, 400mi, 17 days). The history was amazingly rich, the culture a perfect mix of familiar and thrillingly unknown. The Camino Portuguese had been my first ever foray into endurance athletics of any kind, the first time I had felt the thrill of being at my limit and pushing past it, of gritting my teeth and walking through painful step after painful step, and getting to the end, knowing that I had been stretched to new definitions of possible and in doing so, was forever changed. I could not wait to get back out there. But first I had to pay my family a visit.

I flew to Naples on a cheap flight and spent a week strolling around the grimy, twisting streets. Towering walls and narrow alleys made me feel like a ball, rolling around a maze that tilted at random, slamming against dead ends, circling back to familiar junctions mysteriously, and at times being spit out, solved, into a vibrant square. Naples, truly the southeast Asia of Europe, is the best place I’ve ever been to see children playing football in gorgeous squares, amid renaissance architecture, and occasionally appropriating the marble pillars as goalposts. The Italian heat warmed my spirit. Shedding the layers that proved so necessary in London, I smiled and lounged around the city of my forefathers, soaking it in. It was my third time there, and I had a week booked at the hostel. I’d done all the sightseeing I needed to already. I eased off the throttle and let go the manic shoulds I sometimes cling to when travelling. What developed was a lazy, easy and restorative stretch that

Ultimately, and ironically, I wasn’t able to even visit my Uncle Tony, after all that planning to see him. On an impulse, I got my ears pierced in a shop in a dark alley, after hours, and then got quite drunk after sampling the extensive buffet of Neapolitan spritzes. Finding myself at a university party, bumping around in a dark abandoned enclosed square, I was thrilled to be right back on the travel beat.

My time in Rome was brief but productive. I’d already bought all the trekking gear I would need in Naples, and I’d brought enough camping gear to feel confident enough to set out blindly, without much plan. Not much tastes sweeter on the tongue of adventure of setting out, pack full, with only a vague direction as a plan and a vague faith that there will be a good spot to camp.

My favorite haunts in Rome were waiting for me, more or less the same. The curmudgeon in me noticed more billboards, more tourists, higher prices while the romantic in me was blissfully afloat in the music of the city I’d fallen in eternal love with two and a half years prior. I had a lovely time catching up with Marzia, Antonio, Nikki, and Violet over pizza and wine in their home. When I told them my trekking plan, I had to double check my kilometer to mile conversion rate. My frantic time in Rome was punctuated by a loving ride to Tiburtina bus station from my aunt and uncle (actually related to me this time). There I boarded a night bus to Geneva that was of only average hellishness, as far as night busses go. I wonder at what age I’ll stop taking those godforsaken things.

I arrived in Geneva yawning but without a tired fiber in my body. The trek had begun, and I was ready.