About five years ago, San Francisco Chronicle travel editor John Flinn published a column called " A few things I've learned in a quarter-century-plus of travel ." I enjoyed his insights so much I saved the article as a text file -- and I recently stumbled across it again on my laptop. Here are my...

Our family has a long history of making memories instead of collecting things. We love to give gifts, don’t get me wrong, but most of them are little homemade things, or gifts of self in some capacity. Perhaps most precious are the gifts of time and of memories. We didn’t get a honeymoon. I had...

Twenty two kilometers is a good hike. It’s not a full day’s walk, by any means, but it’s a solid start at a leisurely pace. After a month in Paraparaumu it seemed the perfect way to honor the Kapiti Coast and thank her for the gift of rest, recuperation, and peaceful joy. To walk is...

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors--home, car, gym, office, shops-- disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking on e occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”...

"I hit the streets every day with no real plan besides walking and seeing what happens or taking a taxi across town and finding my way back. Or I look out the top of the hotel and see an area and say, okay, I’m going there today—that slum, that village. I go through souks and...

"There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you." --Thoreau, Walking (1862)

"Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. On the road you can think forward, you can think back, you can make a list to remember to tell those at home." --Anne Carson, "Kinds of Water" (1987)

"Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." --Henry David Thoreau, " Walking " (1862)

"I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot." --Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)

"Walking to ease the mind is an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of the process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing." --Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel (2011)

"Walking is a way of remaining in place, or in a place, of leaving oneself to return to oneself, of upping the odds that surprise might flow through. Of giving one's eyes something to do, so that the world might be heard." --Peter Cole, "Jerusalem," Poetry , November 2009

The RTW trip lasted about two years and three days. It started in Pokhara, Nepal, and ended while traversing a pile of ceramic teacup shards this morning in Mirzapur, India. My left sandal has called it quits. In the moment before I accepted its passing, the sandal's life flashed before my eyes. A life of...

Spring festivals are getting underway , bringing the promise of prime walking weather. Although it'll be a little while before Norway warms up, St. Olav's Way is a trek (and bonafide pilgrimage) to check out. The route stretches about 400 miles (643 km) northwest from Oslo to St. Olav's grave in Trondheim. It traces lakes,...

First, decide you're going to go. The untraveled route is the route you haven't taken yet. Or maybe it's your old route with new eyes . Go on foot. Bike. Horse. Rollerblade, skateboard, pogo stick. Start climbing from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port or descending from Roncesvalles -- it really doesn't matter. Avoid the debate and start in Pamplona...

Since I've been anchored to my home for a few months now, I had to find another way to express my need for travel. Here's the solution I found: take several long walks within the week. By doing this, homebound vagabonds don't have to feel trapped or confined when they are between trips. You just...