Tim Mathis's Blog, page 4

The Essential Menalon Trail Guide: The Greece that you won’t find in Athens or the Islands.

There are a lot of reasons that you might want to visit Greece. You might dream of touring the Acropolis and absorbing ancient history in Athens, or of drinking beer on beautiful beaches in the Cyclades. You should do it - that stuff is amazing.

Also though, you might want to eat piles of perfectly spiced meat and dolmades while an old man passionately shout-talks at you about local history. You might want to drink ouzo in picturesque villages and experience authentic European culture and go for nice walks to hidden monasteries while eating delicious orange cake soaked in liqueur.

Hiking the ,Menalon Trail gives you all of this and more in a concise package.

The Menalon Trail is a 75km, horseshoe-shaped route through the mountains of the central Peloponnesian - just far enough off the beaten path to feel both accessible and authentic. It’s an under-visited area with a history stretching back to ancient Sparta. It’s not the Greece of blue seas and white sand. It’s not the glory of Athens. This is the Greece of rolling hills, quaint cafes, old stone houses overlooking dramatic valleys, and goats at your bed and breakfast. It’s a walk between towns where there’s one taxi driver who knows everything and will take you anywhere you want for another 10 Euros. Sorry, he’s not available tomorrow but his cousin can pick you up in the morning and give you your own personal tour if you want. That restaurant? It’s been there since the 1800’s and the pastistio hasn’t changed a bit, thank god. The Menalon passes through the kinds of places that the locals refer to as “the real Greece,” and they have a point.

If you know the Camino de Santiago, it’s a mini-Camino experience with almost as much atmosphere but nowhere near the crowds. It’s a wander between picturesque villages and cafes. It’s monasteries built into cliffs and it’s really just lovely. It was certified as one of the best walking trails in Europe by the ,European Ramblers Association but it’s not that heavily trafficked.

You’re clever for being here, thinking about it.

Enough with the sales pitch though. Let’s sort through what you need to know. There’s a lot of info on the ,official Menalon Trail site. Go there for the official details and the maps and so forth. My goal is to give you everything you need to know in a pleasantly consumable format alongside a taste of what the experience is like.

How to get there.

The trail is point to point, and can be hiked in either direction, so there are two potential starting points if you want to do the whole thing - Stemnitsa or Lagkadia. Neither are particularly close to any other major destinations, but are a part of a constellation of small, picturesque villages in the central Peloponnesian Peninsula - the mountainous, hand shaped blob of land in the southwest of Greece.

In order to get there, most people will probably rent a car and drive from Athens. Regardless of where you start, most points along the trail are between two and a half and three hours drive from Athens.

If you aren’t driving, the easiest way to get to the trail from Athens is to get the bus from the big, central ,Kifisou station to Tripoli, then make your way from Tripoli to the trail.

There are regional buses that serve several of the small towns along the Menalon, but if you don’t speak Greek and don’t have a lot of time, it’s a bit of a handful to sort out routes. You can catch a taxi from Tripoli for a relatively sensible price to the place where you plan to start. That’s what we did. (For us it was around 65 euros for the hour trip.)

Booking the ,Athens-Tripoli bus was a bit hard to sort out online, but at time of writing, buses left around every hour and don’t typically sell out. We went in high season, just showed up at the station, and had no problem getting on the next bus. It seems like that’s what locals typically do too. For us, they sold us an open return ticket, which meant we just had to show up back at the Tripoli station when we wanted to return to Athens, have the ticket validated and jump on the next bus. Easy enough.

The bus from Athens to Tripoli took about 2.5 hours, and the taxi from Tripoli to Dimitsana (where we based ourselves) was about an hour. The whole trip is beautiful and you’ll pass over the Corinth Canal and through the rolling mountains of the central Peloponnesian. Very scenic, and the trip didn’t feel like a chore.

How long does it take to do the Menalon Trail?

It depends, of course, on how fast you walk and whether you do the whole thing.

The whole route is 75km. It’s officially broken into 8 stages (which I’ll list below), but most people will be able to manage at least two stages a day. We broke our walk down into 5 casual and pleasant days (for experienced hikers), with a day of transit on either side back and forth to Athens. So, for the whole experience we budgeted a week. If you’re fit, you could definitely walk the whole route in 4 days comfortably. 3 if you’re very fit. You could also stretch it out if you want to savor the experience.

How difficult is the Menalon Trail?

More below, but every stage is officially graded as moderate. That seems about right. It’s not easy. It’s not terribly hard. It’s a good, sturdy walk. Some sections are slightly more challenging than others, though none will give an experience hiker much trouble. This isn’t wilderness trail, and it’s well-maintained and very well marked the entire way. However, if you want to challenge yourself and push big miles, you could turn it into a decent challenge.

Accommodation along the Menalon Trail

Most people opt to stay in hotels and homestays in the small towns you pass through along the way. I’ll be more specific below, but word to the wise - it’s best to book all of your accommodation ahead, particularly in the smaller towns (i.e. everywhere except Dimitsana and Vytina). This is sleepy country and in a lot of instances there might not be anyone on hand at your accommodation if you just show up without a booking. Have a look on Airbnb for options in places where there are no hotel options. I’ll note where the reliable hotel options are in the stage descriptions below.

You could also conceivably tent camp if you were keen. There aren’t many official sites and wild camping isn’t technically legal but I’ve heard that it’s well-tolerated and through most sections it wouldn’t be difficult for a seasoned bandit camper to find a spot to put up their tent. I tend to be in the “don’t break the law in foreign countries” camp, even if the locals do it, but I’m not much of a risk taker. If I were going to do it, I’d stay low key and set up camp in a discrete location near or after dark.

What to pack

On that note, you don’t really need to take proper backpacking gear unless you really want to. Just a few changes of clothes and what you’d take on a day hike. Bring some paper money because small towns tend to be largely cash economies, and don’t forget your raincoat and sunscreen. Much of the route is exposed to the elements, so both heavy rain and intense sun are possibilities for most of the year. We found a fair number of bathrooms along the way to use but do plan appropriately for some ,wilderness wees and poos. As far as footwear, we wore trail runners and that was totally fine. Heavy boots not required. There was some underbrush and prickly plants so there were times when light long pants might’ve been nice but I wore shorts every day. We did encounter a fair number of stinging insects, so prepare with meds if you have allergies.

Many days you’ll have the opportunity to buy food along the way, but we always packed a lunch and snacks because the taverns and cafes along the way often don’t keep reliable hours.

Similarly with water. Usually you won’t go more than 3 - 4 hours between water sources at most (either restaurants or public fountains), but we normally carried a couple liters for a shoulder season hike.

On food and water, I’ll give a few more details for each section.

Weather

Summer can be brutally hot. It snows regularly in the area in the winter. The shoulder seasons are the most pleasant. It’s a generally warm, dry climate but it’s the mountains and cold and precipitation are more common than in, for instance, Athens. December through February can be properly cold, normally dipping below freezing overnight. June - August are the hottest months, with normal highs in the 80s with a lot of sun exposure.

Tech to use

I bought a local SIM card in Athens and had phone service in a lot of places, which is handy.

For the trip, I recommend downloading:

1) ,Google Translate - for navigating any language barrier.

2) ,Maps.Me - and download the local maps for offline use for those times when you don’t have service.

3) GPX tracks (available on ,Wikiloc) - handy but not essential.

4) ,Paper Maps - also handy to have though not essential. We didn’t buy them but luckily they had a copy at our hotel in Dimitsana. Signs with maps that can be photographed are at most trailheads.

5) We didn’t use it, but at time of writing, ,the Hiiker App seems to also be a good way to go - it has the GPS integrated and accommodation and amenities listed.

Taxi services

At every junction between sections there’s a map with ,phone numbers for the local taxi drivers. In most cases we had phone service at the junctions. This is good to know, because it means that, no matter your strategy, you don’t necessarily have to find a place to stay near where you finish your hike. In fact, some people use one town as a base and taxi back and forth from the trail every day. That’s what we did with Dimitsana. It’s not the cheapest option by any means (transport costs were typically around 50 euros daily for us), but if you can’t find a place near where you want to finish a day’s hike, you can always just plan to taxi to a nearby town.

The taxi drivers we met were often colorful people who gave us a bit of insight into the local history and culture, and they’re hurting for business up there, so it’s not a bad part of the experience to jump in a taxi from time to time.

The Menalon experience

The people of the Peloponnesian are a proud lot. Their ancestors were Spartans and more recently locals were instrumental in the modern Greek struggle for Independence. In the hills they’re struggling economically now, and have been for some time it seems. There’s a bit of tourism economy, some agriculture, and not a lot else. It’s beautiful country though, with dry, scruffy mountains that often reminded me of the landscape around Big Bear California if you’ve been.

The Menalon Trail itself is a scrappy route that’s been established through it - passing between picturesque little towns through the hills and past some of the most important historical spots - monasteries, caves, museums and more. There’s no better way to get to know a place than walking, and they’ve done a great job of arranging a route that helps you experience some of the most pleasant and interesting aspects of the aread.

Planning can feel chaotic at times, which is true of everything in Greece, but in the end things work out. People are helpful, the trail is easy to follow, and if you get in a pinch you’re never far from civilization (or at least a spot where a taxi will pick you up and take you back to civilization).

Map

[map created by Nofootprint.gr]

Menalon Trail markings

The Menalon Trail markers have a characteristic “M”. (See below.)

One slightly confusing thing - other trails in the area use similar markings to the Menalon - square, colored blazes, but without the “M.” It’s easy enough to zone out at times and follow the wrong markers.

Another slightly confusing thing is that there are intermittent markers with distances to the next town or landmark. The distances and times were almost comically inaccurate at times, or contradictory. This was never a real navigation problem. Don’t let them freak you out. Just follow the reliable Menalon Trail markers.

And one final slightly confusing thing - the color of the markers changes between sections, so there’s a red section, a green section, and a yellow section. I’m not entirely sure why (they love a bit of chaos in Greece). All will have the characteristic “M” so that’s what to look out for.

,Scott Rogowski, who’s written another good guide to the Menalon, also pointed out that:

The signs are bent in the direction you need to go. If the sign is not bent, that means continue straight.

Basically, they bend the corners of the square signs down to make an arrow pointing the way you’re meant to turn. (Click above to see Scott’s page for illustration - I didn’t take a photo myself, and don’t want to steal his!)

You’ll also come across signs with town names and distances. Distances are in familiar script, but town names are often only in Greek, so it’s useful to learn the basics of the alphabet before you go (or just use the ,Google Translate camera feature to help you read)!

And speaking of signs, most towns have a full map of the trail so you can track your progress as you move along.

Stages

The official stages are as follows:

Section 1: Stemnitsa-Dimitsana Time: 5 hours. Length: 12.5km

Section 2: Dimitsana-Zygovisti Time: 2 hours. Length: 4.2km

Section 3: Zygovisti-Elati Time: 5 hours. Length: 14.9km

Section 4: Elati-Vytina Time: 2:30 hours. Length: 8.5km

Section 5: Vytina-Nymphasia Time: 2 hours. Length: 5.6km

Section 6: Nymfasia-Magouliana Time: 3:30 hours. Length: 8.9km

Section 7: Magouliana-Valtesiniko Time: 2:30 hours. Length: 6.6km

Section 8: Valtesiniko-Lagkadia Time: 5 hours. Length: 13.9km

How to break up the trip

There are a lot of ways you could break the trail down. We decided to do it over 5 days:

1) Stemnitsa to Dimitsana (12.5 km)

2) Dimitsana to Elati (19.2 km)

3) Elati to Nymfasia (14.1 km)

4) Nymfasia to Valtesiniko (15.5 km)

5) Valtesiniko to Lagkadia (13.9 km)

We chose our sections based on distances vs. the desirability of nightly destinations. That meant we never had a day over 20 km. It also meant that we didn’t have to carry anything beyond day hiking gear, and knew we’d be sleeping in a nice place every night. It worked in part because we decided to stay in Dimitsana and shuttle between start points via taxi. Our taxi costs added up, but we also got a great deal on a beautiful place in our favorite town on the trail. Pros and cons, right?

If you’re fit and want to stay in decent sized towns and do it as a thru-hike without taxis, you might think about a 4 day itinerary.

Stemnitsa to Dimitsana (12.5 km) Dimitsana to Vytina (27.6 km) Vytina to Valtesiniko (21.1 km) Valtesiniko to Lagkadia (13.9 km)

That won’t require any massive days but it is a bit more challenging on days 2 - 3.

A quick tip regardless: Zygovisti, Nymfasia, Magouliana, and Elati are all really small places without hotels. Valtesiniko is also quite small. If you plan to stop for a night at any of these and need accommodation and food, check out Airbnb, where you might find a room for rent, or plan to catch a taxi to one of the bigger towns along the way.

Taxis aren’t a major hassle so don’t need to stress in your planning. Break it up as you see fit.

Other bits of housekeeping:

There are reliable ATMs, markets and restaurants in Stemnitsa, Dimitsana, Vytina, and Lagkadia. There’s a reliable tavern in Valtesiniko. There are only hit or miss taverns in Zygovisti, Elati, Nymfasia, and Magouliana. One or two of those will probably have a place open when you arrive, but don’t bank on it.

Stemnitsa to Dimitsana (12.5 km)

A lot of people think this is the prettiest and the hardest stage. It’s definitely the most popular, and I can see why. The hike is down a steep, beautiful gorge and back up. It has more than 3000 feet of climb and descent across about 8 miles. There aren’t many water sources - just a fountain shortly after leaving Stemnitsa and then a stream a few miles before Dimitsana. Most of the climbing is in the middle so carry plenty of water. There is a decent amount of tree cover but also long periods of exposure to the sun so it gets hot. Start early if it’s Summer. You genuinely can’t get lost - or, well, it would be very hard because every intersection is well marked and there are plenty more markers along the way for peace of mind.

Stemnitsa is a very cute town in the hills, made up of lots of stone houses with clay tile roofs organized into compact, narrow streets. As we were getting started, a nice old gentleman directed us into the coffee shop with a smile, a gesture and some Greek we didn’t understand. Friends were sitting on the square as we got started early in the morning. Our coffee and pastries were served by a smiling, round 75 year old lady who spoke no English at all. It was all just adorable. This is civilization!

There are three monasteries along the way on this section, two of which are still operating. To me, the best was the Old Philosopher because it’s from the 10th century, and it’s a cool collection of ruins. The monks at the New Philosopher are supposed to make delicious candy - like Turkish Delight - but there was no one around when we went through unfortunately. St John the Baptist (Prodromus) is probably the most photographed, and is set back dramatically into a cliff. I’m pretty sure you can go in for tours, but we didn’t. If you plan to, take long pants for men and skirts and shoulder coverings for women. We did receive a blessing from a couple of black-clad, silver-bearded monks and saw a mule scratching its butt on a fence.

This section is not a fast hike because of the up and down and all of the places to stop and look. It took us 5.5 hours including more than an hour spent at the Open Air Water Power Museum about a mile from Dimitsana. This mostly outdoor exhibit is worth visiting. It’s an old gunpowder mill/tannery/grain mill combo, and it helps you understand a lot about traditional ways of living here. It cost 4 Euros to get in and there is a small cafe.

The whole area is famous for its gunpowder, and our taxi driver gave us the rundown. The Peloponnesian helped produce the firepower that eventually allowed the locals to fight off the Turks and the Ottoman Empire who’d been in charge since the 16th century when the Greeks fought for their independence in 1821.

For some interesting and grisly history, one of the area’s most famous sons is Gregory V, who was an Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the Orthodox Church. Roughly speaking, that means he was the Orthodox Pope. He was in charge at the time of the uprisings that kicked off the Greek War for Independence, and because the Ottoman Sultan at the time didn’t feel he was doing enough to stop it, he was lynched and killed. I don’t see how that sort of behavior does anyone any good. Clearly it didn’t stop the Greeks from kicking out the Sultan.

It’s a region that’s been seen as mildly feral for quite a while, but with history like that you can see why they wouldn’t trust outsiders. They’re proud hIllbillies with their own identity, like my own people in Appalachia. Some of the terrain reminded me a bit of West Virginia and Kentucky - even if the landscape is a bit more dramatic and the community a whole lot older. Locals here fought in the Trojan War. Most of them have moved away, but the few thousand who’ve stuck around seem to have a strong sense of history and identity.

Dimitsana, to me, is the highlight of the trail towns. It’s just a magical place, with stone houses crowded together on top of a dramatic hill with expansive views in all directions. All of the towns are scenic, but Dimitsana is just the best. Imagine sitting in a bar balcony on a warm evening, affordable beer in hand, with a traditional dish of pasta and a view across miles of rolling green hills, densely packed old stone houses perched on impossibly steep grades, cool breeze on your face…

You get the picture. It’s just one of those places.

Dimitsana to Zygovisti to Elati (19.2 km)

Our second day of walking was a very different experience from the first. The terrain up to Zygovisti is rocky and exposed, with fantastic views back to Dimitsana. The climb is steep at times but short - less than 5 km after Dimitsana and you’re in Zygovisti, which is a very small village. It has several taverns but only one was open when we arrived. The place is picturesque, but sleepy. Even on a weekend day, we didn’t see anyone outside of the tavern, and there were only 5 - 6 people there.

There’s a gradual at first but then a relatively steep climb up from Zygovisti. A few kilometers out the terrain shifts abruptly, and changes from rocky, low bush to pine trees and soft trail. Then, it’s a ramble through mostly forested terrain all the way to Elati. It’s much cooler than hiking in the sun. it’s mostly gradual with a few short, steep sections, if a bit overgrown.

We did manage to get off trail shortly in the woods amidst a series of old roads and trails. I really do believe it that if you think you’re off track on the Menalon, you probably are. It’s unusual not to be able to see a trail marker either in front of you or behind you. If you can’t, you are probably off. If you walk for five minutes and don’t see a marker then you’re definitely off and will need to backtrack to the trail.

The most notable landmark along this section was Lygkos Cave -an old hideout for a notorious robber from years past. You’ll still find a wooden ladder up to the cave, now decrepit and broken.

It makes you wonder, is it worth it to rob folks for a living if you have to live in a solitary cave in the woods? Get a job, right?

But then, maybe I’m getting it wrong? Maybe he decided to rob people because he wanted to live in a cave, and living in a cave doesn’t pay well. I’m assuming he was a criminal. Maybe he was just a desperate recluse, deeply connected to the hills and bitter about the human society that tried to keep him from his true nature? In any case…

Key things to know: If the tavern isn’t open, you’ll find a public fountains in Zygovisti, as well as a spring fed fountain at a church a kilometer or so above after town. There are no other reliable public water sources until Elati. If you take purifiers, there are a few creeks along the way. Otherwise, pack enough water and food to get yourself the 15 km to Elati. Zygovisti - Elati is the longest stretch on trail between towns/services. There is a tavern in Elati but it also keeps unreliable hours depending on the season. There are a few guesthouses there, but if you plan to stop there and haven’t booked ahead, you’ll probably need to taxi in to Vytina.

Note: Elati is actually on (well-signposted) side track. If you don’t want to stop there, you could save yourself a couple kilometers by skipping the spur that takes you there. It’s not a bad place if you do decide to go. It’s just small.

Elati to Vytina to Nymfasia (14.1 km)

This was a very nice day of walking for us, with pleasant, varied terrain.

Elati to Vytina is an idyllic 8.5 km walk that follows a stream most of the way, with a few nice swimming holes if it’s hot. There is a fountain a few kilometers into the walk, and intermittent stone ruins along the path.

Vytina is a bigger town than Elati - about 1000 people, and it’s also a tourist destination so has a lot of tabernas and shops and guesthouses. It’s a bit of a ski town in the winter, and in other seasons it’s a perfect place to stop for lunch, or a night’s sleep if you prefer. Like the other towns along the Menalon, it’s been recognized as an official “Traditional Settlement” by the Greek government - a village that retains its traditional character and lifestyle. There are around 400 of these enchanting little places around Greece. Vytina is a Menalon Trail highlight - relaxed but alive and vibrant. To me, after Dimitsana, it makes for the best town on trail to spend an evening.

During the section between Vytina and Nymfasia, I really started to notice the variety in terrain along the Menalon. This is another short section down a bit into a rocky canyon, then back up steeply to Nymfasia. Where the previous stretch followed a stream under shade, this is primarily sun exposed, rugged trail. It’s a really beautiful stretch but less forgiving in the sun.

Nymfasia is a pretty town on a hillside, with a tavern on the square that is well-reviewed. Unfortunately there was no one around when we arrived. Every review you read of the Menalon mentions some experience of arriving to a town and feeling like you’re the only one there. Nymfasia was that for us. Nothing was open, and no one was around but a couple of stray dogs. We called a taxi. It’s a quick ride back into Vytina.

This section I started to really appreciate this trail. There’s a sweet spot for me with walking: a couple hours of hiking in beautiful terrain, followed by stops in town for coffee or lunch. For me this trail ticks those boxes - a bit like the West Highland Way or the Camino de Santiago. The logistics can be a bit more challenging than those routes because in the smaller towns along the Menalon, businesses can’t necessarily be relied on to be open. But while that can be frustrating if you are depending on them, it becomes a charming local quirk if you plan ahead. Do that, and choose to be charmed. You can rely on Stemnitsa, Dimitsana, Vytina and Lagkadia for food and a glass of wine - the other towns are bonuses.

Nymfasia to Magouliana to Valtesiniko (15.5 km)

I found the section between Nymfasia and Magouliana to be the most difficult of the trail, probably in part because my legs weren’t fresh anymore, and I didn’t prepare myself emotionally for a challenge. Consistent with other sections, this leg has it’s own character, which I’d describe as rugged. The trail was a bit overgrown in places with nettles and thorns, and seemed a bit ill-kept compared to the other sections. It was still very well marked. It was a steady climb with some short, steep sections interspersed. Like the first section of trail, it has highlights that make the effort worth it. You pass the Monastery of Kertnitsas, an old structure build on an outcropping of rocks, said to be founded in the 12th century. And, the steep climbs along the trail are rewarded with nice, sweeping views.

Another highlight along the way is the Old Hermitage of Sfyrida, an ancient little brick bungalow built into a cave at the bottom of a hill. I didn’t know it was coming so I was excited to find it. When we arrived, I noticed signage, but it was all in Greek, and after a few weeks in the country, I’d resigned myself to not understanding anything that’s going on. Luckily a couple of British walkers arrived shortly after us and read the sign on the door. I’d assumed that it said something about how this was a holy place, and that we need to keep our grubby selves out. The Brit, who was somehow fluent in Greek, told us that it just said to close the door behind you after you have a look. The inside was exactly the type of place that you’d expect an Orthodox Christian Hermit would live: seats carved into stone, walls decorated with icons, loose bottles of chrism for blessing, a back closet for prayer. It was baking outside, but cool in the hermitage - the cave providing nature’s climate control.

Just below, there is a cold spring and a lovely little grotto. The Celts often built shrines in these types of places. It’s true in Greece as well, it seems, where you’ll often find chapels or small shrines near springs, thanking God and the saints for the water from the rock, I’d guess.

After a steep uphill grind on rocky trail, you come to Magouliani which is said to be the highest village in the Peloponnesian Peninsula. It was a nice enough little town perched precariously on the side of the mountain in a way that we were starting to get used to. There was a taberna in the center that looked great, but as happens, it was closed when we arrived. We continued through town with little fanfare.

The next section to Valtesiniko was short - about 7 km - and I have to say that it stood out for its unpleasantness on a trail where every other stage is some level of delightful. From the start the trail was overgrown with nettles, thorns and cheatgrass, a winning combination, and it seems that beekeepers had colonized most of the route because hives were places alongside the trail for the portions that weren’t made up of crumbly gravel and shist. The upside is that it is mostly flat and is one of the shortest sections. Every trail has some filler. This is the Menalon’s filler.

The middle portion of this section starts when you pass a small, relatively modern, thoroughly nondescript church. It continues past a decrepit condemned sanitarium, and concludes with another small, slightly more descript stone church.

I’m not saying that this section was haunted, but I will say that I peeked into the first church, and it was strewn strewn haphazardly with chairs that seemed to suggest some sort of bizarre disturbance. When I stepped inside, the metal door creaked, the air grew still, clouds started to gather and we heard thunder in the distance. Angel insisted that we get away quickly because the area was giving her a bad feeling. The sky continued to darken and for the first time, following the trail got slightly confusing. We realized we were off track, pushing through a dense tunnel of thorns, weeds and bush. We heard noises in the distance from the grounds of the sanitarium, so we backtracked to the trail as quickly as we could, stopping only briefly after we rushed past a buzzing swarm of bees, one of which stung Angel. Shortly after, someone had placed a beehive directly in the center of the trail, so we routed around it. When we made it to the second church, the sky lightened again and things seemed to return to normal. Like I said, I’m not saying that the area is haunted. I’m also not NOT saying that.

By Valtesiniko though, things were back to normal. It’s a big enough town that at least one restaurant seems to reliably be open, and we stopped in both a cafe for coffee and a taberna for lunch. We gorged ourselves and I got the impression that the trail rewarded us for making it through the cursed forest, because our lunch (a typical Greek experience of piles of meat, a salad of feta, cucumber and tomato, and fries) was remarkably cheap and delicious.

Valtesiniko to Lagkdadia (13.9 km)

This final stretch is a really nice way to finish, and it has a bit of everything that makes the Menalon pleasant. It starts with a beautiful climb out of Valtesiniko with views back over the town. We heard monks’ chants rising up through the mountains along the way, which made for a magical morning hike. The day was, to me, a pleasant combination of things - some of it mellow, some of it hard work. Not easy, not hard. Moderate. Just like everything on this trail.

After heavy rain and hail the day before, the trail passed through some soggy pine forest which gave the place an almost Pacific Northwest feeling.

After five days of relatively few wrong turns, we did manage to get off track - the easiest places on the Menalon to miss markers are when you’re walking along a road and the trail turns off away from it. It’s easy to zone out walking along a road, and we missed two markers in that scenario. It wasn’t a big deal and it reinforced that, truly, if you don’t see a marker for 3 minutes on the Menalon, you’re off track. The trail passed a frankly underwhelming castle ( the church has done more for its monks than government did for that place) before getting into some rugged rocky trail that continued the rest of the way to Lagkadia. It made for a bit of effort at the end of the trail, but it was worth it for the nice views over the hills, including an expansive teaser view of Lagkadia (When you see town for the first time, you still have an hour or so until you get there.)

Lagkadia was a perfect place to finish. It’s a beautiful little town pasted to the sides of steep hills like so many of the others, with huge views of the valleys below. Most importantly, there were multiple great little cafes to choose from, several of which had spectacular views over the canyon. There are multiple hotels to stay there, or it’s an easy taxi ride back to Dimitsana or Vytina if that’s your preference.

Post-trail Post-script

That's it! That's the experience. Have some wine and some orange cake and celebrate.

Greece is a place that can feel chaotic, but in the end everything works out. You'll get stressed, but you can relax because you’ll find people to help. The Menalon experience seemed like that at times. Bus timetables online were impossible, everything was in Greek, signs were a confusing mix of colors, there’s conflicting information about what towns have what resources, it’s hard to predict when attractions will be open and when they won’t.

It’s part of the charm though, and in the end it all works out.

On our way back to Athens, our host at the guesthouse where we stayed sorted out that if we caught a taxi to a nearby crossroads we could catch a bus into Tripoli at 8:20 AM. It is an hour ride so we thought that should give us just enough time to get to Tripoli for a 9:45 connection bus to Athens. As a bonus, there’s a cafe at the crossroads where you buy your tickets, and a cute little old lady will sell you an espresso double with medium sugar while you wait.

The taxi drivers in the Peloponnesian mountains were impeccably prompt, and the plan went off without a hitch to get to the cafe by 8:10. Then, we waited for the bus in the sun with a few other passengers, while a lazy stray dog stared at us, resting in the shade underneath a bench. 8:20 passed, then 8:30. I started to wonder if we’d been misled. Neither the other waiting passengers nor the dog seemed bothered so I tried not to worry. At 8:40 the bus finally arrived which made our connection much tighter. It was agonizing to watch the clock while the bus plodded along, stopping in small towns and crawling around corners on the curvy mountain road. The scenery was undeniably beautiful in the morning light though - dramatic green mountains rising abruptly from dead flat valleys, the sun coming in at an angle that made it all glow. We arrived in Tripoli at 9:40, 5 minutes before our connection. We had just enough time to use the restroom and have our transfers validated. We hopped on just as the bus was rolling out. The excitement of travel is often about these kinds of small victories more than the drama of climbing mountains or communing with the gods at ancient ruins.

The Menalon Trail will give you all of that though. It's a real hidden gem.

18 books that you didn’t know were about pilgrimage, with very short reviews.

There are a lot of great books about the way that travel changes you. Some of them are recognized as classics about pilgrimage. Most aren't. Writing about this topic, I've come across a lot of really good books that you might like. This is a list of those with very short reviews. It's an informal bibliography of sorts, but that sounds boring, right?

Better - it's a list of books that have the potential to change the way you think about travel.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Books about pilgrimage, but no one bothered to mention it: On the Road . Jack Kerouac drives around the US acting like and asshole. Inspires a generation. Get in the Van . Henry Rollins quits his job at Haagen-Dazs to travel town to town, screaming at people and punching them. They spit on him and punch him back. Although he doesn't seem to learn anything, looking at who he has become, he must have. Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart . No one has captured the emotional experience of thru-hiking better than Carrot Quinn. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . Murakami runs 6 miles a day and it turns him into the best writer in the world. Pilgrimage: A Medieval Cure for Modern Ills . Dave Whitson provides the spiritual inspiration for the GAP Month . He wrote this book for smart people. You knew it was about pilgrimage, but you've probably never heard of it. "If a tree falls in the forest..." and all that. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival . John Vaillant tells a story about Russian plebs who try to track down an elusive man eater. The man eater mostly wins but we all learn things in the process. The Motorcycle Diaries . Che Guevara as a pompous young dickhead who becomes a revolutionary by interacting with normal people. The Beach . Alex Garland. Oh my lord this beach is a real shocker. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. The true story of how Dennis Covington goes back to his roots and accidentally joins a snake handling cult. The Voyage of the Beagle . Darwin goes outside for long enough to realize that the world doesn’t work the way that everyone thinks it works. Some people still don’t believe him. How the Word is Passed. Clint Smith goes on a voyage through trauma history and writes the best and most heartbreaking travel book that isn’t marketed as a travel book. The Song of the Dodo . David Quammen travels to small islands and figures out that we’re all screwed. Great stories along the way. Bill McKibben said it was perhaps the best book of science journalism ever written. I’m a Stranger Here Myself . Bill Bryson goes home and somehow makes you want to move to the Midwestern United States. Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home . Heather Anderson is a normal person who walks really far, really fast, and transforms into a superhero along the way. Roughing It . Mark Twain tries to understand America a long time ago. It was a mess then and it’s still a mess now. Them: Adventures with Extremists . Jon Ronson investigates why people are so crazy by hanging out with them for a year. It isn’t reassuring. Man’s Search for Meaning . Viktor Frankl goes to a concentration camp and comes out with the most inspiring book you'll ever read. The Autobiography of Malcolm X . Malcolm X travels in America and it traumatizes him and makes him a radical. Malcolm X goes on Hajj and it helps him find peace. Then America kills him.

There you have it.

If you're interested in pilgrimage, also have a look at these articles about The GAP Month.

Not enough? Both of my books are about pilgrimage too.

A Template for DIY Pilgrimage and Backyard Adventure: Lessons from an Urban Thru-Hike in Portland

Maybe you want to go on a trip that will change your life.

The ,GAP Month is a framework designed to help you do just that. It’s a type of trip that’s meant to be both life-changing and accessible. You can read a lot more at the link but in short, it’s a month long trip that has the classic elements that make pilgrimage impactful. It involves significant time away from home (a month, give or take), human-powered travel, an element of adventure, personal rituals and intentions, and involvement from people you love.

One of the key problems for someone who wants to take this sort of trip is where they should go and how.

The easiest way to solve that problems is to ,just pick an existing route and go. There are plenty of long-distance trails, bike tours, traditional pilgrimage routes, and paddling corridors. You could just pick one and do it. It’s straightforward. That’s why hundreds of thousands of people do the Camino every year, for instance.

But what if you want to be more creative? What if you can’t go far from home? What if you’re the type of person enchanted by the idea of walking out your front door and off into the world, like in ,The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?

In that case, you can design your own route. You can make up the rules for your own life-changing journey.

Why would you want to do that? Maybe you don’t have the time or money to jet off to some remote locale. Maybe you want to follow the traditional pilgrim spirit and step out your front door and onto the road. Maybe you want to go to a place that doesn’t have an established long trail or pilgrimage route. Maybe you’re just the creative type and like the idea of choosing your own adventure.

In any case, this article is meant to help with that.

How do you design your own epic adventure?

Early on as I was releasing these GAP articles, a couple of different people said that they’d like to hear some advice about designing their own pilgrimage routes close to home. I wanted to provide some guidance, but I wasn’t sure how to ground it in reality, not actually having done such a thing myself. While this article on ,Taiwan Cycle Route 1 covers some useful ground, it’s not really the same thing.

Then, I remembered my old friend Six2. While he maybe wouldn’t label what he does as “pilgrimage” per se, he’s organized this sort of trip multiple times.

So, I called him up and I picked his brain for nitty gritty details - from tips on planning to safety to transportation to budget.

And now, here we are: grounded in reality.

First things first, who is our adventure expert?

Six2’s name is actually David, but we met on the Pacific Crest Trail so I know him by his trail name. He got it on the Appalachian Trail where other hikers kept asking him how tall he was.

“I”m 6’2.”

After a few times the name stuck.

Six2 is one of those people who lives an extremely interesting life but doesn’t go around blogging about it. His adventures are personally motivated and he doesn’t normally self-promote. He’s a prototypical case study for ,The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life and I must have mentioned him in there at some point.

I met Six2 on the PCT, but a few years ago I also joined him at the end of one of his more madcap adventures, when we walked 30 miles on the WIldwood Trail which passes through Portland, Oregon. It was the conclusion of a months-long project that he designed himself - a more than 300 mile route that connected all of Portland’s public stairways (with more than 10 steps) into a giant, winding circuit through the city’s streets. I just did the last section. He completed the entire route.

This trip, I realized, was exactly what we’re talking about here. It was an eccentric, self-organized, human-powered trip in a non-traditional location that took on all of the elements of pilgrimage.

In short, it was a great trip to use as an example for an article about how you can design your own local pilgrimage or adventure route.

A few days before I wrote this article, Six2 and I spent an hour and a half on the phone talking about this trip. He’s nerdy enough that he plans meticulously and keeps the receipts, so he’s an ideal guide for this sort of thing.

These are the things we talked about that you should know.

(I’ll be “quoting” Six2 a lot the rest of the way - I should give the disclaimer that almost every quote is actually a paraphrase. It’s all roughly accurate though. None of it is wholly made up.)

A Portland stair pilgrimage, for example.

Let’s start by answering the question a little bit more concretely, what did Six2 do in Portland? It’ll give you some good ideas, I’m sure of it.

Six2 was keen for a local adventure, so one year he spent a bunch of time marking out all of Portland’s public staircases on a map, and tracing a route that connected them. Then, he spent his winter walking the circuit in sections. He didn’t take time off to complete it so he fit it in around work and domestic commitments (although he was only working part-time so he did have some degree of time flexibility). He didn’t go out every day but he did prioritize walking most days of the week, rain or shine. It took him a few months, and the trip concluded when he and I walked the Wildwood.

During the hike, he slept at home each night and primarily used buses to get to and from his route. He’d normally bus to the start and then back home from where he finished, connecting segments piece by piece. Some days he would park near a bus stop, catch the bus to a point miles away, and walk back to his car. Some days friends or his partner would help him out, dropping him off or picking him up. In the end, he’d walked the entire route.

Because it was winter in the Pacific Northwest, he often walked in the rain and occasionally snow, and because of his schedule he often found himself walking after dark.

This might seem like a strange thing to do, but he described a variety of motivations when I asked him about it.

He did it because, after years of summer excursions, he wanted a project that would allow him to spend long periods of time outside to help battle the doldrums during the PNW winter. He couldn’t easily get away from home, and wanted to get to know Portland better anyway. He loves planning and he “wanted to do normal things in abnormal ways.” So, taking inspiration from Liz “Snorkel” Thomas’s ,Urban Thru Hikes, he designed a route and completed it.

Planning the route

The fundamental problem for the DIY pilgrim is where to go - determining both your destination and how you’ll get there.

Six2 pointed out that, to some degree, you just have to make a call.

“Decision paralysis is a real problem. The possibilities are endless, but at the end of the day you just have to find something that interests you and go with it.”

For him, it was public staircases in Portland. That’s idiosyncratic and arbitrary, but it gave the trip a structure and allowed him to begin the process of building his route.

“[F]or me "every public outdoor staircase (with 10 or more steps) in Portland" added points of interest, I went to the top of big hills in town, checked out parks I hadn't seen, crossed all the big bridges with foot paths.”

The question for the DIY route designer is about what interests you. “It helps to have a theme.”

In order to spur ideas, SIx2 suggests following interesting people on social media (“You have to check out ,Beau Miles! I can’t believe I haven’t talked to you about him!”), and reading up on destinations that seem appealing. Then, make a decision on what you’ll do based on personal goals and interests. You could design a route between restaurants, historical structures, churches, or parks (,The aforementioned Snorkel did this in NYC). You could walk between friends’ houses. You could walk around something big (Puget Sound or ,the San Francisco Bay), or you could simply focus on walking towards a destination that matters to you. I mentioned ,The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It’s a fictional story, but also a charming inspiration for this sort of thing. Harold decides on a whim to walk out his front door and across England to get to an old friend who has received a terminal diagnosis.

Your destination, and the stops along the way, give structure to the experience but there’s not a magic formula. Ultimately, you pick some poles that interest you, and you move between them.

The traditional types of pilgrimage structures are either point to point or along a set circuit. You could also design a route that looks like a starburst with a series of out and back trips from a central point (like your house), or something meandering - a wander in the wilderness.

Some of you are planners like Six2 and may want to meticulously mark out your route street by street. He said that, for him, this was a big part of the fun.

“I realized that I just like planning. It was an excuse to learn about the city, and places that I never would’ve gone otherwise. It let me spend a bunch of time staring at maps and figuring out these secret, weird little pathways that no one uses anymore.”

For others, you might not care to determine more than your start and end points, and simply decide day to day how to move between them.

Six2 said that it’s important to consider what you want to accomplish both personally and physically with this sort of thing. What do you want to get out of this experience? Are you trying to get fit? Do you want to walk around your city, or explore a destination a long way away? Do you want to be in wilderness or town? What’s your budget in terms of time and money? Can you get time off work or do you want to figure out how to work within the bounds of your day to day responsibilities?

Six2 also said that it’s important to think about how you’ll know when you’re finished. You may pick your start and end points physically, but figure out in the middle that the experience is no longer serving your personal goals. So, you may decide to quit early. He said that he follows something that I’d call the “never quit on an uphill” principle. If you’re tired, and you want to quit, don’t let yourself do it straightaway.

“I have an old rule that if I want to quit, I mentally commit to continuing for three more days. If I still want to quit after that, then I can. I think it’s helped me build up resilience over the years.”

The goal is to make sure that you don’t end up giving up in a way that will mean missing out on what you were trying to accomplish personally.

Tools for route planning

Six2 talked about a set of useful tools that he uses during the planning process for these sorts of trips.

First off, just go to the library: “I got out a bunch of books, those “Walking Guide to Portland” type books, and “50 hikes within 50 miles of…” I also found this old coffee table book called “The Stairs of Portland” that had pictures of the places I wanted to go.” At some point someone has probably written a book that’s related to what you want to do, no matter how weird it is.

Also, do some research online to see if someone has done something similar to what you’re planning in the past. There’s very little that’s new under the sun.

“There’s the ,Inman 300, for example, in L.A. where someone made a route between all of the stairways there.” Even if it isn’t exactly what you’re planning, finding other similar examples can be a great way to get inspired.

More concretely, “Transit maps are your friend.” He suggested that if you’re building a tour of a city especially, consider transit hub locations during your planning. You may need to access transit for a variety of reasons, and it’s helpful to work them in along the route.

The time-honored way to build a route is by marking it out on a paper map, but these sometimes don’t have the level of detail that you need, and tend to be car focused.

Generally speaking, maps and tools designed for cycling can be more helpful and available. (Local walking maps help, of course, but they tend to cover smaller areas because people don’t usually walk hundreds of miles at a time.)

Six2 suggested using ,OpenCycleMap.org in planning because it has regularly updated, ground level information crowd sourced from people actually using these routes. It’s isn’t a great site to use on your phone, but it is on your laptop.

The app ,Locus Maps allows you to access data from OpenCycleMaps on your phone.

The simplest, most universal tool for building a map online is ,MyMaps on Google Maps where you can build a route by adding pins at checkpoints along the way between your start and finish.

Personally, I’ve also used ,Maps.Me - It’s an easy to use tool for following downloaded GPX files on your phone, and when you have data you can use their walking and biking functions to identify routes on the fly that will be amenable to walkers or cyclists.

For non-urban areas, Six2 suggests ,NaturalAtlas.com, which allows you to build maps that it can break down into segments by distance.

“,Google Street View is also great because it allows you to actually look at where you’re planning to go, and figure out if it’s going to be safe or feasible.”

Safety during urban adventures

Planning an extended trip like this, naturally you’re going to be concerned about safety issues. There’s some level of risk involved with any adventure, but there are things you can do to go as safely as possible when you’re planning your trip.

For Six2, “#1 in safety for me, if it's an urban hike, that risk is probably from cars. I mitigate that risk by choosing routes that separate you from traffic. At one point in my PDX walk, I had to walk by traffic at night, not ideal. Good planning helps avoid that; Google street view, driving out to assess the route in advance, asking people who have gone that way before (forums, Reddit, Facebook). Most cities are safer than most people think, especially during the day when other people are out, but if you're not sure, ask local people about the areas you want to go, and get a couple opinions if it sounds sketchy.”

The challenge when designing a route is going where you want while avoiding sketchiness as much as possible. Not all areas are amenable to human powered travel. Having at least some cursory knowledge of where you’ll be passing through can help you avoid some of the biggest risks.

Gear

Because he slept at home every night, Six2’s gear could be pretty basic. He recommended wearing road shoes vs trail runners if you’re going to be on pavement a lot. He mentioned good rain and cold weather gear, a day pack, and a headlamp. Beyond that, for a trip like this, you just need basics like food and water for the day, a first aid kit, your wallet, your phone and a bus pass.

“The good news for urban hikes: people live in cities so basically whatever you might unexpectedly need you can probably buy.”

If you’re ,wilderness hiking or, bike touring the lists will be different, of course. A good thing about something like Six2’s local approach is that it keeps gear costs down. That might be less of a concern if you already have the stuff.

Accommodation

An advantage of designing a route close to home is that you can conceivably avoid paying for accommodation by just returning to your house every night.

Barring that, the options include utilizing free housing networks like ,Warm Showers and ,Couchsurfing, designing a route that takes you near friends’ houses, or using paid options like hotels, hostels, and campgrounds.

Bandit camping is also a time-honored tradition among bike-tourists and long distance walkers.

I’m no pro, but this guy Tom is. ,This is a great guide to wild camping anywhere.

As you’re planning, you can design your route to arrive at set accommodation every night, or you can plan to just finds places en route. Another option is to move between transit hubs and use buses to get to accommodation if there are none near your route. Or, export Six2’s strategy and stay in one central location and use transit or taxis to get to your daily start and end points.

Cost

“My costs were really only transportation and food. It was $5 for a day pass on the bus. Food can be a problem because there’s always the option of stopping in a cool little spot.”

But maybe that’s the point? Maybe you want to try out the local food as a part of the experience.

“Some people want to stop at all the bodegas and cafes and stuff. If you want though, you can keep your food costs really low by packing your meals.”

The good thing is that - compared to other travel options - this sort of trip can be very low cost, particularly if you design a local route, stay with friends or figure out how to avoid accommodation costs with free options like Couchsurfing and wild camping. What’s cheaper than walking or riding a bike?

Gear costs, of course, will vary depending both on the type of trip you plan and the amount of gear you already own.

Transport

Six2 mainly used public transit to get to and from his route from home. He also drove to transit hubs at times, took the bus a few miles away, and then walked back to his car. Sometimes he got dropped off and picked up on route by friends or his partner, which helped. Taxis and Ubers are also an option in populated areas, but those costs add up quickly.

As you’re thinking about where you’ll go, consider looking for places with good local transit options, or plan how you’ll get by without it. (Cycle tourists know that a bike, of course, is a great life hack for this problem.)

Making sure it is pilgrimage

In my experience, if you do something like this, it’s going to take on meaning. Take a month off and it’ll change your life. I’m sure of it. The GAP formula works.

But Six2 spoke to some of the specific ways in which this was true.

“This walk was really how Portland started to feel like home. I hadn’t lived there for that long at the time. Through the hike I became a part of it and it became part of me.”

He also said that he had some poignant moments along the way.

“One night midway through, I was coming down this hill in the rain, it was dark and I was drenched and miserable and dirty. I came upon this little cafe and stood outside the window looking in. I just thought about the situation, like I’m secretly doing this thru-hike while everyone is just living their life around me. It felt weirdly subversive and revolutionary. I felt this sense of connection with itinerant pilgrims through history even though I was in my own city, not even that far from my house. I was having these experiences that normally you can avoid in the city - spending the day in the rain, feeling dirty and hungry. It was a moment!”

Six2 used the trip to connect to his local area, but he said that he also very much wanted a physical experience. “There is something essential for me about the challenge part, about the physical exertion. It's way different from a short vacation just to relax.”

It was a helpful process for battling Seasonal Affective Disorder, getting outside on short PNW winter days, and “with all of the stairs, I really got fit. It ended up being my biggest hiking year in terms of miles, and because I did that over the winter I was a lot more fit in the summer when the normal hiking season arrived.”

Bringing friends and family into the experience

You would assume that working people in to the experience would be easy if it’s in your backyard.

However, Six2 said, “I found that because I was going places that people had already been, I had a hard time convincing them to come out and walk all day with me, especially in the rain.”

“I did drag my partner along one day but it ended up being on of the most muddy and miserable days of the whole trip so it wasn’t really a good experience for her.”

He also said that he’d planned to share the trip online,

“But usually by the time I got home and cleaned up and walked the dog I didn’t feel like getting online. I talked with people about it, and I shared some photos, but it was less of a public thing than I originally thought it would be. It mostly just ended up being a thing I did.”

He did endorse chronicling these sorts of experiences carefully though.

“I’m not someone who obsesses over archiving but I have a friend who did the Appalachian Trail 20 years ago and he still goes back to his stories and pictures. It’s the only thing he’s done like this in his life and he still relives it and finds it really meaningful. I don’t know if he’d feel the same way if he didn’t have all those photos and notes.”

We talked about the difference in community involvement in local trips and the ones he’d done in other areas. “I think the Couchsurfing thing is great. It’s a great way to meet local people and get local information.”

It also taps into the pilgrimage tradition of relying on hospitality of strangers. “You don’t even have to stay with them though. Sometimes I’ve just used it to organize a meetup for a coffee or something to meet people and get information about a local area.”

Pros and cons of an urban or local thru-hike

When we were wrapping up our conversation, I asked about some of the pros and cons of doing this sort of local walk.

“Keeping my carbon footprint down was a big one. Also I could do it without feeling like I was leaving my partner behind with all of the domestic duties. I could still walk the dog and make dinner. I passed through places where I never would have otherwise, and I saw things at a walking pace that people normally just drive by. It gives you some of the joy of thru-hiking but in the city.”

“It was also something I could do in the offseason when you can’t really get into the mountains safely. It wasn’t a wilderness experience but it’s surprising how much you still feel like you’re outside, even in the city.”

“I had one of my sketchiest river crossings ever on this trip, right in Portland. An old bridge had gone down and I ended up crossing a decent-sized river on a skinny, slippery log. It was terrifying. Then, on my way back I did find a bridge over the river, but I was meant to be going up this set of stairs that I found out had fully rotted away years ago. Someone had tied a rope in its place but I had to scramble up the side of this steep hill in the rain on loose soil and rotten wood. I was in the middle of the suburbs but I never got that dirty on the PCT!”

Still, “Logistics are easier because you have shops and buses and taxis. It’s probably easier for the average person to organize this kind of thing than a trip in the wilderness.”

Surprisingly “My feet actually had a hard time on this trip. Hard surfaces require different shoes. I switched to road running shoes because I’ve hurt myself in the past on pavement in trail runners like I usually wear hiking.”

In Conclusion…

The GAP structure is about taking the time and space to do something challenging and unusual, recognizing that it’ll have a significant impact on your life.

Talking with Six2 reinforced that it works in real life. From start to finish he talked about the impacts and exciting bits of his experience. For him, the planning process allowed him to nerd out, learn about his area, and imagine a big, personal adventure. During the walk he had experiences that he never would have had otherwise. He dealt with some real challenges and had some poignant moments. He got fit, and he looks back on it as a moment when he really bonded with his new home.

His experience also reinforced that a trip with the potential to be life-changing doesn’t have to be organized around anything magical or unique. Six2’s route was just about staircases. His destinations weren’t spiritually significant. They were just something to give structure to his planning and add points of interest along the way. You can design a pilgrimage route to pass through emotionally evocative landmarks, but even if your destination is mundane, it’ll work.

His trip also highlighted that meaningful travel doesn’t have to happen a long way from home. It’s the most traditional model of pilgrimage, actually, to head out your front door and walk along a circuit or towards a specific destination that you can reach on foot. The experience isn’t always about going somewhere distant. It’s about figuring out how to get to your goal safely, relying on the hospitality of strangers and your own ingenuity. This sort of local trip ticks all of those boxes.

Hopefully you’ve picked up some good ideas and resources in this article. Get in contact if you’re keen to discuss your own ideas. I’m always happy to talk with like-minded weirdos. Check out the other articles in the GAP Month series for more ideas and inspiration.

The DIY Pilgrim: A checklist for transformative travel based on age-old pilgrimage principles.

In this series of articles about the ,GAP Month, I’ve pulled together core concepts to help you, dear reader, organize a travel experience that will almost definitely be life-changing. GAP stands for “Goal-directed Adventure or Pilgrimage,” and it’s a model based on both personal experience and the long human tradition of pilgrimage. There’s a lot of time tested stuff here.

It’s a lot to read though, so in this post you’ll find the tl;dr distilled essence. It’s the “to do” bits, which you can use as a checklist for building your own experience. It includes links to the other articles and some key outside resources to get you there.

If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend at least checking out the ,introduction to the series for context, but think of this as your DIY pilgrimage checklist.

Here it is, concisely, what you need to do to organize your own GAP Month.

And FYI, if you want to read more on any of the topics, full articles on each subject are linked in the headings.

,Carve out a month away

A key characteristic of transformative travel is that it’s disruptive. It interrupts your normal flow and gives you enough distance to look back on your life from an outside perspective. Time is a big part of what creates disruption. It’s not a magic number, but a month is a reliable amount of time. It can be longer. It can be shorter. A month is good though.

Use a month away as an intentional disruption if your life feels stagnant. Alternately, if something big has already interrupted your life, use a GAP month as a way to process. The key is to give yourself the time and (literal or figurative) distance needed for change.

I haven’t personally written much here about the practicalities of saving and getting the time off work, but I do cover that sort of thing in ,The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life.

Here are some links to things other people have written on the practicalities of organizing time away:

,How to ask your work for extended time off, from the Harvard Business Review ,How to budget for extended travel, an excerpt from The Adventure Travellers Handbook by Nellie Huang ,Logistics for long-term travel from the Journal of Nomads blog. An excellent ,Complete Beginners Guide to International Travel by That Travelista Nomadic Matt’s ,How to Travel the World on $50 a Day is a classic practical book about this sort of thing.,Decide where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there

When you’re thinking about impact, the key thing isn’t how exotic or extreme or distant your destination is. It’s the story you tell about the place. Your destination should be a place that means something to you, or represents something you’re seeking.

And when you’re thinking about your means of travel, the key is to see the journey as the key to the process. It’s not just about where you’re going. It’s also how you get there. Classically, pilgrimages involve a long walk along a specific route or towards a specific location. In the modern world, you can customize, but there are solid physical and psychological reasons to incorporate a significant amount of human-powered travel, beyond just tradition.

When you’re considering where you’ll go, and how you’ll get there, think about what you want to accomplish on this trip. Think about the type of place that you’re drawn to. Think of what will be realistic within your timeframe, level of fitness and budget. To make it a bit more straightforward, pick a route that’s already established. ,Use this existing list of pilgrimage routes, long trails and destinations. You can also DIY your own route, of course. Pick a place to go, and pick a human powered means of getting there.,Make your DIY pilgrimage an adventure too

Adventure, by definition, is the act of stretching yourself. It’s taking on a challenge that you’re not sure you can overcome. It’s risk, effort, excitement, and the unknown.

It’s also a way to make sure that all of this is something you’ll enjoy. Adventure is about fun.

When you’re planning a trip, think about what sort of challenge you’re going to take on. How can you create a situation where you’ll have to push boundaries you haven’t pushed before? To answer this question, you might ask yourself how you want to grow. Is the key physical, personal, or cultural? You might also ask yourself what actually sounds like fun. A long cycle trip? An immersion experience in a foreign culture? A circuit through your local mountain range?

For resources on physical and mental preparation for this sort of experience, ,Adventure Ready by Katie Gerber and Heather Anderson is the gold-standard.

,Set your intention

If you know what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it. This is probably why, classically pilgrimage involves some sort of specific, conscious intention. While historically these sorts of intentions have been wrapped up in religious concepts and language, they don’t have to be.

GAP travel is likely to help people who are dealing with a variety of personal challenges. Pulling from the history of pilgrimage and research on modern pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, people go on pilgrimage with roughly six different types of intention. You might think about whether your trip fits into any of the following categories:

Are you looking for transcendence or enlightenment. In less spiritualized terms, are you trying to sort out what to do with your life or get your act together? Are you trying to figure out whether or not to quit your job? Are you trying to connect with something bigger than yourself? Do you want to learn something about yourself or the world? Do you have some kind of health or healing goal? That could include coping with a new diagnosis or getting fit enough to do the things you want in life. It could include a desire to finally start to address addiction or unhealthy habits. Are you going because you want to connect with nature, culture or history? Maybe life feels artificial and shallow and you’re looking to place yourself within a bigger context. Are you going for “penance?” That is, are you going to right some sort of wrong, or figure out how to correct an area of life that feels off? That could incorporate struggling with grief, loss, or trauma. Are you going as a rite of passage? That is, are you going in order to transition from an old situation into a new one? Graduation or an empty nest or loss of a job or retirement? Or, are you just wandering? Are you not sure what you’re looking for, but know that it’s something? Maybe this is just about openness to experience. Maybe it’s about stepping out of a comfortable inertia “to shake the sleeping self” to quote a book title by Jedidiah Jenkins.

Set your own intention for this trip. Don’t have to stress too much about it. Just follow your gut.

,Integrate ritual

The word “ritual” can strike of magic or religion, but it’s also a psychological trick to mark out a particular life experience as special and create a sense of meaning around your trip. Integrating your own rituals into your experience will help facilitate and cement the transformation you’re looking for.

Designing your own rituals maybe isn’t intuitive, but you can draw on some time-honored

strategies:

Bring along a book to read devotionally during the trip. That is - a book with a specific focus on pilgrimage, or on your destination, that will add a sense of meaning and purpose. Pick “sacred places” to visit along the way - places designed for reflection like temples, museums or historic monuments. Organize some small ritual to start the experience, and again to finish it. Could be as simple as signing in and out of a trail register, or organizing a before and after gathering with friends. Journal daily Wear something that will outwardly identify that you’re on a significant journey. Bring along a “votive offering” - something that you’ll leave behind on the trip to represent the transition you’re making.

I know all of this can seem weird. I won’t tell anyone about your rituals if you don’t.

For further resources, Casper ter Kuile’s ,The Power of Ritual is an excellent, non-sectarian introduction to rituals for the rest of us.

If you’re the academic type, check out Ellen Dissanayake’s ,What is Art For?

,Go alone, but bring people along with you

Every pilgrimage is personal and individual, but every pilgrimage also involves and impacts your community. A key part of making sure that this experience is wholistically transformative is to think about how you’ll involve your friends and family, and the people you meet along the way.

Think about inviting other people along during your training and preparation process. Recognize that, even if you’re going solo, you’re going as a representative of a community. What might that mean in your situation? Think about how you’ll talk about what you’re doing with people you meet along the way during the trip. Make a plan for how you might report back to friends back home during the experience. Social media? A blog? Postcards or letters? Photos or video? You don’t have to do any of these, but if done correctly it’s possible to make this a rich experience for your community, not just yourself. Consider how you’ll share and debrief the experience afterwards. You could prepare a public presentation. You could write or create art. You could simply organize an informal gathering among friends.

The full articles in this series will give you more ideas and rationale for using GAP Month principles to DIY your own transformative travel experience, drawing on centuries of pilgrim experience. For simplicity’s sake though, if you follow the guidelines in this list you can put together an experience that will be reliably life-changing.

For one last shameless plug, when you get back, if you’re interested in applying some of the lessons of transformative travel in your day to day life, check out ,The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life. It’s my book, birthed out of years of reflection on these sorts of experiences.

Go alone, but take people with you: Individual pilgrimage as a community endeavor.

In this series, we’ve been introducing the ,GAP Month as a reliable framework for transformational travel. In short, it's a month of goal-directed adventure or pilgrimage with the following characteristics:

,You take at least one month away from home. ,You move towards a specific destination, or along a specific circuit - preferably using human power. ,You make it an adventure (that is, include some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). ,You set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific). ,You integrate some form of ritual (not necessarily religious). You go alone, but bring people along with you.

In this post we’re focusing on community - the part about going alone, but bringing people along with you.

In writing this series of articles about putting together a GAP Month, I’ve followed a straightforward formula to this point: I’ll read up on peoples’ thoughts around specific aspects of traditional pilgrimage, crib some ideas, and add a bit of my own spice. No problem.

When I got to the point about community though, things started to get confusing. People generally agree that there’s both an individual and a communal element in any transformative journey.

But “there’s both and individual and a communal element” in literally everything that human beings do, so that’s not particularly helpful.

“Pilgrimage” is a broad concept, and when people discuss the role of community in pilgrimage, they come out at some complicated and contradictory places.

In some discussions, pilgrimage is very much defined by the community. Pilgrims are sent at a spiritual leader’s behest. Pilgrims go as a group together. Pilgrims go because it’s a religious obligation, or a cultural norm. Masses of pilgrims converge together on a sacred site and participate in collective rituals as a core aspect of the experience.

But there is also the tradition of the pilgrim as a solo traveler: someone wandering alone in the wilderness, or walking a lonely path towards their goal. Taking a pilgrimage is often seen as an individual decision that requires one to leave behind their most important relationships, at least for a period of time, to search for something outside of their day to day existence. It’s a personal, internal journey.

I spent some time trying to reconcile these seemingly contrasting visions of pilgrimage, and the epiphany came when I was reflecting on my own experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2015 while also coping with my father’s death.

You go alone, it’s true, but you also bring people along with you.

Sorry if this is a little dark, but I promise it isn’t pessimistic.

You will be alone

As a product of individualistic American cultural imagination, it’s probably not surprising that the most common image of a thru-hike is of the individual hiker struggling along, alone in the wilderness against the bears and the elements.

It’s not exactly like that in most cases. On the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, thousands of people start around the same time each year, hiking north in a bubble together. For most people, the experience very much involves the building of community. Some of us - like me - go with a partner. I walked with my wife Angel, and we slept in a tiny, smelly two person tent, which meant that I was literally never actually alone for the 5 months we were on trail.

But a thru hike is an experience of being a lot more alone than normal. You’ve left behind your home community, focused on the idiosyncratic interest of doing nothing but walking for months, and you live most of your life in your own mind. You normally see people every day, but only a few. Even when you walk with others, it can feel like an individual, isolating pursuit: Angel and I ran out of things to talk about within a month. After that you mostly walk in silence.

Trigger warning:

For me, I became hyper-aware of my own isolation on the PCT because my dad died in the middle of our hike. He had glioblastoma - an aggressive, terminal form of brain cancer. It came out of nowhere.

It’s hard to keep a discussion of the death of a parent simple, but there’s really only one thing I want to highlight about the experience here: the isolation.

When a parent dies, it sucks you into a black hole. When people describe bad ketamine trips, I think about the months around my father’s death. You feel detached from life, and for a period of time you can’t feel things properly at all. You’re paralyzed, and nothing seems to matter any more.

It’s hard to describe, but I think it’s common. Regardless of whether you’re in the middle of a thru hike, grief makes you feel entirely alone.

It sucks you into your own head.

It also highlights the fact that no one really understands what you’re going through.

I’m foreshadowing here, but when you’re struggling, all you want is a sense that you’re not in it on your own.

One of the problems is that, as you go through it, you realize that other people aren’t actually experiencing things the way you are. Even within my immediate family, we coped in different ways and struggled with different aspects of Dad’s dying. There was Dad himself, of course, who was going through an experience that none of us could relate to, and a physical process that none of us could do anything to prevent. But my mother and siblings and wife had different struggles than I did. We tried to support each other, but all of us were emotionally wrecked in ways that made it messy. We didn’t fight. We just had our own stuff to deal with.

When we got back on trail after Dad’s death, for two straight months I walked along with Angel, fully in my head. I rightfully felt that she didn’t actually understand what I was experiencing, but I recognized that I didn’t understand what she was going through either. Even when you’re together, no one suffers in the same way.

Losing my dad was the most isolating experience of my life.

And, I was already alone in the woods when it happened.

It was a hard, complicated situation to navigate.

Isolation drives connection

Grief makes you all dark and hopeless, but isolation is a normal fact of human existence. Of course no one can ever fully understand another person, ,even if they read their memoirs.

But the thing is, we don’t normally feel alone. In our day to day lives, most of us feel a sense of connection to other people. We’re communal animals.

For me, the sense of isolation I experienced along the PCT wasn’t “normal.” It wasn’t how I felt prior to Dad’s death, and it wasn’t how I wanted to feel after it. So isolation became a problem to solve.

The way you address a feeling of isolation, of course, is to get closer to other people. Isolation creates a hunger for connection.

In a weird way, it also creates a pathway to connection. I’m foreshadowing again, but that sense of isolation - that we all suffer alone - can become a point of commonality. You realize that even if no one else will ever fully understand your experience, all of us carry around these types of things.

Everyone realizes it at some point.

One thing we have in common is that we’re all alone.

This is an emotional lesson of death, but I think it’s also a lesson of pilgrimage.

Environments where people feel isolated are fertile grounds for community.

In grieving Dad’s death, Angel and I started the process of trying to connect immediately. We wrote messages to friends and family, we reconnected with people we hadn’t spoken with in years. We made calls and wrote blog posts and personal messages. It’s natural. People want to connect when they’re grieving.

But we also got back on trail less than a week after Dad died. It wasn’t intentionally planned, but in doing so we headed into a paradoxically perfect environment for coping with isolation.

On a long hike like the PCT, you go out into the wilderness on your own.

But so do a lot of other people.

When you run into each other on trail, the isolation you’re both feeling is an easy point of connection.

So you make friends quickly.

You’re still alone. Sometimes you don’t see those friends ever again, if your hiking pace is different.

But now you’re alone, with friends, which is quite a bit better.

This is a central social dynamic of the trail. It is an environment where people are more open to connection than normal because they’re isolated. So, you start feeling very alone, but you quickly form a web of connections that make you feel more comfortable.

—

We went through this process twice.

During the first few months of our hike, Angel and I made a strong set of connections with hikers we met along the way.

But then, we got off trail for three weeks when Dad was passing.

When we got back on, everyone we knew had long since left us behind. We’d gone from the middle of the hiker bubble to the very back, and lost track of everyone we’d been hiking with, outside of an occasional Facebook update.

We were alone again, and now the sense of isolation was magnified because I’d just lost my dad. My emotional range varied between numb, angry and crying. I was lonely and grieving.

But straightaway, we were surrounded by people who were socially disinhibited by their own isolation. Alone in the wilderness, you might as well be open and honest.

I didn’t always want to talk about what had happened. The first person we passed after we got back on trail was a guy whose trail name was “Ellen Boxers.” He was moving really slowly - he was near the very back of the pack - but he was sending videos to Ellen Degeneres from the hike because he wanted to get on her show. I’m not sure if he succeeded, but talking to him about it was the first conversation I’d had in weeks that didn’t involve Dad’s death. It made me feel connected to reality again, there collecting water in a creek in Northern California.

Frequently, I did talk about Dad’s death though.

When Angel and I crossed into Washington, we met a couple of hikers we hadn’t encountered before. Their trail names were Nips and Pie. We camped one night in the same spot, and 12 hours later we were walking through the woods, crying together. We kept a connection through the rest of the trail.

By putting yourself in a situation where you feel isolated, you open yourself up to new community in unexpected ways.

By surrounding yourself with other people who feel isolated, you enter an environment where real connection can happen almost immediately.

People are drawn to inspiring experiences

You’re probably starting to understand a bit of what I mean when I say that, for travel to be transformative, you have to go alone, but also bring people along with you.

It’s about accepting your isolation but also using that as a point of connection with people along the way.

Remember that, because it’s a big part of the point, but there’s another dynamic at play here, because pilgrimage also involves your existing community.

In a GAP experience, even if you go alone, you bring your community along with you in some way or another.

The idea here is that you leave home for a significant period of time, but then you come back. You go out from your community, but you also return to it.

The connections from home never really go away.

Because you’re doing something big and interesting, some percentage of your friends and family will want to be involved. That might just mean that they will want to hear your stories about how it went. But often people will want to be connected more directly. They will want to know how they can support you in your experience, or may even want to join.

That’s a standard social dynamic when you decide to do something inspiring, which is what we’re talking about here.

You’ll go, but your community will want to go with you in some way or another.

—

From the beginning of our PCT hike, Angel and I had a lot of support from home. A friend shipped us our food boxes as we approached our resupply points through the whole trail - a six month commitment that started before we even left. During the first half of our hike, my parents drove us to the start at the Southern Terminus. We met up with friends near San Diego and Yosemite. Family visited when we passed through Big Bear. A few friends from Seattle drove down and hiked with us for a day in Northern California.

But when my dad died, the support increased dramatically.

When we told friends from home that Dad had passed, and that we were going back on trail, two things happened:

People expressed their empathy and love. A mass of friends and family sprung into action to join and support us along the way.

Why? It’s a potent combination - doing something inspiring and needing the sort of support that people can empathize with.

I think people were naturally interested in what it’s like to spend five months walking across a country, but they were also interested in the emotional part of the process. Once Dad died, our PCT became a real, epic quest with emotional resonance. It felt that way for us, and I think other people felt it too.

When people understand the why, they’re more drawn to the what.

After we got back on trail, one set of friends rearranged their vacation to meet us for a five day stretch in Northern California, hiking 20 mile days to keep up. Another friend drove all the way from Seattle to Southern Oregon to help us get from the trail to the airport for my father’s memorial service (it happened a month after his death for a variety of reasons that aren’t important here). After Northern Oregon, people met us at every major road crossing. On at least 7 different occasions, friends drove for hours to connect at a random point in the woods for moral support, to transport us into town, or to bring us food and supplies. More than 50 separate friends and family met us at some point along the way.

There was a lot of hugging, and a bit of crying, but also a lot of laughing and eating and appreciation for the opportunity to walk miles through the mountains with friends.

We made it to Canada eventually.

Mom met us with my uncle, and we spread some of Dad’s ashes at the Northern Terminus.

On the PCT, we invited people along, without a doubt, so we were intentional about involving our community. But we only begged for help once. Otherwise people came along to support and be a part of the experience because they wanted to.

Why?

I can’t fully speak for them, but I think there are a lot of reasons. People recognize a struggle and want to help you through it. It feels good to support someone doing something hard or inspiring. Watching someone else going through something challenging also teaches you lessons that you might need for later, so it’s personally valuable. And when you know what it’s like to go through hard things yourself, there’s something uniquely meaningful about walking beside someone who’s doing the same. When you help someone along the way, you feel like a part of it.

In short, people are drawn to support this kind of thing because they get something out of it too.

Your pilgrimage affects other people

Go alone, but bring other people along with you.

It suggests something about the isolation you’ll experience on a GAP month.

But it also gets at the point that traditionally, pilgrimage hasn’t just been about the pilgrim. It’s also been about the impact that pilgrims have on their community.

When people support you on a trip like this, they have a meaningful experience.

When you return to your community from a trip like this, you bring back lessons that are broadly significant.

Your trip impacts your community.

In the religious world, there have always been inbuilt ways that pilgrims involve and report back to their home churches and communities. The communities know that they benefit from their experiences, so they support them. Religious pilgrims then typically know that their journeys are not just about them. They feel a responsibility to the communities that have sent them out. They pray for them along the way, and then speak in church and prepare presentations and help other people arrange their own pilgrimages in the future.

For those of us without religious communities though, the process is maybe a little less obvious - or a little less structurally guaranteed.

After the PCT, I had to sort out ways to report back on my own, but it felt like a compulsion.

The lesson I learned, and the thing that I talked about when I got back home, was that it’s your friends and family that get you through.

I don’t know how profound that is, but it’s what I felt at a deep level during the process of hiking and grieving.

I wrote things online. I also had a lot of melancholy conversations with friends on walks in the woods. We had reunions with other hikers. We gathered with friends and told stories.

In our immediate friend group, because so many people had supported us, we had new points of connection. We had new depth in a broad set of relationships. New shared experiences. Our friends helped us get through a big, crazy, difficult walk in the wilderness, literally and figuratively. For our part Angel and I bared our souls during one of the hardest periods of our life together, and we kept walking north until we finished.

We weren’t the same as when we left, but neither were our relationships. Our community was different too.

If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll also know that after the PCT Angel and I started Boldly Went - a series of events where people could gather and tell their own stories about the things they learned on adventures. That project was an expression of the lesson that it’s friends and family that get you through.

I’m not saying that we changed the world, but I do think that, as a result of our trip, our community was impacted. For a few years, we helped tighten the bonds between people in the outdoor community in the Pacific Northwest as a direct outgrowth of the lessons we learned on the PCT.

It wasn’t an intentional GAP Month, but that’s what can happen as a result of this sort of trip.

So what does it mean to go alone, but bring people with you?

There’s been a lot of storytelling and innuendo here, so let’s just state it directly.

Here’s why I say that our PCT trip was a good model for the GAP experience:

A GAP Month will highlight how alone you are. It’ll be something you experience differently from anyone else - even if it’s along an established route where you meet a lot of other people doing the same thing. It will also open up avenues for connection. It will make you more open to connecting with new people yourself, in part because you’ll be lonely. It will also make other people interested in what you’re up to, and will make them want to join in, directly and indirectly. Bonus points if you go along an established route, because then you will be surrounded by other people who are also lonely and more open to new relationships than normal. A GAP Month is an intervention aimed at personal growth, but it is also a way to make an impact in your community. The degree to which this will happen is determined by the degree to which you involve other people, and how intentional you are in welcoming them in to the process - from start to finish.

All of this is summarized by the idea that “you go alone, but bring other people along with you.”

This is about you, but it’s also about your people.

That’s what you’re aiming for with a GAP month.

Some ways to intentionally bring people along on pilgrimage with you

It can feel self-indulgent or embarrassing to invite people along on something like this, but remember that people like supporting epic journeys and being exposed to people doing inspiring things. People like to support their friends through big events. It makes them more confident that they can do similar things themselves. It helps them learn what the experience of overcoming a challenge is like so they can repeat it. And being a part of events that are important to other people just feels good.

How can you create that opportunity for them? And for yourself? Here are a few straightforward suggestions.

Go on an established route. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s an advantage to picking an established route for your trip. It’s easier to sort out logistics, and you’ll meet people along the way doing the same thing that you are. You don’t have to, but it makes a solo experience social without putting in any additional work. Just go do the Camino or part of the Appalachian Trail or the Bibbulmun Track or something. Involve others in planning your experience. Find people who have done similar things, who like to travel, or who are interested in what you’re doing. Grab coffee and talk through your plans with them. Get their input. Go as a representative of your community. For religious people, this might mean involving your faith community. A secular option might look like fundraising or “walking for” a specific cause or community. People understand that. It’s an inroad to connection. Take along a friend or partner or family member. Maybe it goes without saying at this point, but you don’t have to do this by yourself These types of trips will be transformative whether you go alone, with a partner, or in a group. Integrate friends into your experience even if they can’t go along through the whole process. If you’re designing a local route, consider crashing at friends’ houses along the way. Ask if they want to join you for part of the trip, or support with transport or logistics in some way or another. Send out the itinerary you’re planning to follow so people will concretely understand what you’re doing. Make the training process a social experience. Invite friends to go with you if you’re taking long walks, runs, bikes, paddles, whatever in preparation for the bigger trip. Share your experience via social media - photos, writing, music, whatever. It’s one of the few healthy ways to use social media. Think about how you’ll report back after the experience. You don’t have to sort this out now. Let it take a shape that makes sense for you. You’ll probably feel compelled to do this in some way during the trip so don’t stress. Just recognize that sharing lessons learned afterwards is part of the process. It’ll continue for years. This article is still part of that for me. 8 years later now and I’m still talking about the PCT and what I learned from it. Conclusion

You can maybe see why people get a bit muddled when they try to describe the relationship between the individual and their community on a pilgrimage. It’s complicated. We’re all individuals living in our own heads, but tied up in a web of connections. We’re always both alone and connected.

So, one more time, what does it mean to “go alone, but bring people along with you?”

It means recognizing that travel, like life, is a journey that you’ll experience alone. Even if you go on a trip with thousands of other people, you’ll experience it differently from anyone else. You’ll be headed out into the world for your own reasons and will collect your own experiences. You’ll feel isolated by this fact at times.

However, that isolation can be an important driver for human connection. It can make you hungry for relationships. You can anticipate this and integrate it intentionally.

You might be surprised about how excited other people will be to be involved, because what you’re planning is inspiring.

Invite them along, and make it easy for them to join in some way or another.

They’ll appreciate it. Human beings are social creatures. All of us form our identities together. What you’re doing will be important for your community.

But your community will also be important to what you’re doing.

By involving them, you’ll impact not just your own experience, but the shape of the social world that you live in.

You’ll turn your own solo experience into something that changes other people as well.

Transformative travel isn’t just about you. Like everything in life, it’s about you, me and everyone.

So, in conclusion, go alone, but bring people along with you.

You probably already know this, but this post is part of a series about the GAP month model for transformative travel. I made the model up, sort of, but really it's based on classic pilgrimage principles. Have a look at the rest of the articles when you get a chance (the link will take you to the introduction, which has links to the rest)!

Travel is my church: Using ritual to turn your trip into a pilgrimage (Go on, make it weird!)

In this series, we’ve been introducing the ,GAP Month as a reliable framework for transformational travel. In short, it's a month of goal-directed adventure or pilgrimage with the following characteristics:

,You take at least one month away from home. ,You move towards a specific destination, or along a specific circuit - preferably using human power. ,You make it an adventure (that is, include some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). ,You set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific). You integrate some form of ritual (not necessarily religious). You go alone, but bring people along with you.

In this post we’re focusing on ritual.

In short: Embrace it. Do odd things. Watch the magic happen.

I’m guessing that, unless you’re a certain type of religious, you probably don’t want to read an article about “ritual.”

I say that because a lot of modern humans have a fundamental problem: we’ve developed suspicions around practices associated with churches or worse, cults.

There aren’t many terms that trigger that suspicion more reliably than “ritual.”

It evokes magic and superstition and creepy things that old white guys do behind closed doors.

Fair enough.

That suspicion is there because of all of the disgusting, abusive things that churches and cults have done.

“Religion,” whatever that means, has been a vehicle for manipulation and abuse and old-fashioned tomfoolery for centuries, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

I’m with you.

However, the dilemma with the general suspicion around religion is that religion actually does a lot of things that are good. It’s stuck around because it’s a package of things that human beings need: an easy path to new relationships, experiences of transcendence, routine, and a vehicle to help your community. Those sorts of things.

In fact, the bad is only possible because of the good. You can use religion to manipulate people because it’s powerful and it meets basic, universal human needs.

With some bits of religion, it’s easy to see how the good parts work. People go to the same place every week, work on common projects, put money into a common pot, sing songs together and listen to a common message and agree on a common set of beliefs. It’s easy to see why all of that would bond and connect you and help you feel like a part of something bigger than yourself.

With ritual, it’s much less obvious how it meets basic human needs. It’s not entirely clear to most people what ritual even is, let alone why it’s such a universal feature of religion and human experience.

Let’s address that quickly.

What is ritual?

First, let me ask you, what’s the image you see when you hear the term “ritual?”

For me, a series of things come to mind. I think of a priest holding up a chalice, I think of a devil worshiper making a pentagram out of pigs blood in a horror movie, I’m kneeling at an altar in church, I see witches casting weird spells around a cauldron, I imagine the crowd circling the mysterious black Kaaba in Mecca.

Those are all rituals, it’s true, but what the hell is all of that? What ties all of it together, other than coming off as vaguely disturbing to outsiders?

To try to provide a concise answer, Casper ter Kuile, a Harvard chaplain and the author of ,The Power of Ritual, defined a ritual as an action taken with intention, attention and repetition. It’s something you do over and over again, for a specific reason, making sure to do it right each time.

In his definition, this includes gestures like when Christian practitioners make the sign of the cross when they pass in front of an altar. It also includes things such as when my wife and I make each other coffee in the morning, doing so out of concern for the other person’s mental wellbeing and as a gesture of love.

Ritual actions like this take on a significance beyond the physical gestures. They mean something to the people who do them, which is why they’re repeated. They enrich our lives and give small day to day experiences a sense of purpose and meaning.

That’s a pretty good start, but here’s a less concise, maybe more sophisticated definition of ritual.

A ritual is a physical action that you take in order to mark out a specific experience as special, or important.

I used to live in a housing co-op with a brilliant researcher at the University of Washington named Ellen Dissanayake. She spent her career trying to sort out why people do art, and wrote mainly from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. In other words, she tried to answer the question, why would human evolution keep art around? How could art possibly provide a competitive advantage and help us survive as a species?

In her book ,What is Art For? she developed the theory that from a very early stage in human evolution, people would have needed ways to make socially desirable activities both memorable and pleasurable to ensure that they were repeated. Art in its various forms developed as a way to achieve this. Art is a way to mark out important objects, behaviors, actions and events so they can be remembered and repeated, treasured and learned from.

When Ellen talked about art, she included the visual arts, music and dance, but she also included ritual.

Ritual is a form of quick and dirty theater (my words, not hers). Just like a painting isn’t just oil smeared on canvas, a good ritual isn’t just waving your hands around. It’s a striking little bit of drama meant to communicate something to yourself and others. Rituals often clearly call back to something specific and memorable - like the sign of the cross. The key though is that they are distinctive, unusual actions taken to mark out an experience as unique.

I’m trying to distill a lifetime of Ellen Dissanayake’s academic research into a few paragraphs, and I’m not sure if it makes sense.

But to state it simply, when you do a ritual, it makes an experience special. You feel it differently and you remember it later.

What I’m saying is that ritual actually is a sort of magic.

Why do we need ritual, in short?

So this is the thing: even if it immediately arouses suspicion, ritual is both necessary and normal and universally human - just like art and music.

When you do a ritual, it changes your experience. It makes you feel things. It makes you remember a moment. It can associate something small with things that are much bigger. Walking across a physical stage can become a transition into a new stage of life. Placing a ring on someone’s finger can become a lifelong commitment to them. Admitting that you’re an alcoholic in a group can be the start down a path towards sobriety.

Just doing a ritual can transform a mundane experience into something infused with emotion and meaning. Think about the seventh inning stretch at a baseball game. Without “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” it’s no different than any other break. With it, the seventh inning becomes a period of anticipation. A celebration of the experience. A countdown to the impending moment of truth that will determine the winner. A way to engage with a hundred year old tradition. A way to connect with thousands of strangers around you. It’s an annoying old song with “Cracker Jacks” in the lyrics, but it works magic in the right context.

That’s the power of ritual.

The action isn’t what’s important, exactly, but without the action the important bit might be missed or forgotten.

Even more, important experiences might not actually become important unless they’re marked out by a ritual.

The ritual makes sure you remember things, and pay attention to their significance.

That’s a lot, but it’s why we need to include ritual in this discussion of how to create a transformative travel experience.

Ritual in pilgrimage

What we’re talking about in this GAP series is how you can create a travel experience that will stand out as important in your life. It’s meant to be life-changing and transformative in some way or another.

Historically, these types of trips have been called pilgrimages, and pilgrimages have always included various sorts of rituals.

In fact, pilgrimage is a type of ritual itself. It’s a trip that represents something bigger, and which takes on meaning beyond the journey.

The act of taking this sort of trip makes a particular moment in life special.

So congrats. If you take a GAP Month, you’ll be completing a ritual.

But pilgrimages also traditionally contain multiple smaller rituals as well. In the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims shave their heads and dress in specific white Ihram, but the most evocative ritual is circling the Kaaba - a giant, black obelisk - seven times to initiate their journey when they arrive in Mecca. On the Camino de Santiago, pilgrims wear scallops on their packs, leave small stones carried from home at the Cruz de Ferro near the journey’s high point, and conclude their trip by hugging a statue of St. James in Santiago Cathedral.

What do these pilgrimage rituals get at? Broadly speaking, they acknowledge that there there are a lot of small moments along the way in any journey that are important, and worth remembering. And, they mark them out and energize them with meaning. The rituals themselves create that sense of significance.

While just taking the trip will have ritual significance in your life, integrating a series of rituals can help instill a deep sense of meaning in your journey as well.

How to integrate rituals into your own trip

If you’re wondering if I’m saying that you should make up a bunch of little rituals to do along the way in your trip, and identify yourself publicly as a weirdo, the answer is yes, absolutely.

Well, sort of. Let me explain.

I know this is all weird. I feel weird doing this sort of thing myself.

But the idea is that you want to highlight the important parts of what you’re doing, and facilitate progress towards your intention (which we discussed ,in the last post).

This might mean waving your hands around publicly or wearing a special hat.

But maybe not. You might keep this all between you and me - just setting your own little private rituals but not telling anyone who might judge you for them.

(I won’t tell them about your secret rituals if you don’t tell them about how - after returning from walking the Camino - I hiked solo into the Cascades in Central Washington and jumped naked into a lake. It helped me wash off my prior life and get started on my future. So invigorating!)

All of this stuff smells like “spirituality,” and that’s fine, but you don’t have to call it that. Think of it as positive psychology that draws on centuries of experience from pilgrimage. It’s not about any specific religious belief. It’s about tapping into the weird, animal, human bits of ourselves and using tools that are known to have a strong psychological impact.

Let’s get more concrete about this.

Things that you might want to ritualize, and examples of how you might do it.

Drawing on lessons from traditional pilgrimage, there are a few types of rituals that often get integrated into these sorts of trips that you might want to consider.

Firstly, there’s the “funny hat” idea. You might consider doing something physical and visible that will identify to yourself and to others that you’re on some kind of important journey. On the Camino, that’s a scallop shell. On the Dajia Mazu pilgrimage in Taiwan, we saw people wearing high vis neon hats and vests. When we hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, I grew my beard out and my wife died a streak of her hair blue. In our case these weren’t intentional markers of pilgrimage. We followed our instincts and it just seemed right to communicate our identity visibly.

There’s something about publicly declaring your intention and identity that makes this sort of experience real.

You might also consider how you can put exclamation points on specific moments along the way.

Traditionally, the start and finish of trips have included ritual gestures. On the Camino, this is picking up your pilgrim passport at the beginning of your trip, and then your Compostela certifying that you’ve completed the journey at the end. It’s like signing in and out of the experience.

On the Pacific Crest Trail, hikers do this literally - signing the register at the Mexican border, and then again at the Canadian border, marking the beginning and end of the trip formally.

But it could really be anything. At the start of the ,Race to Alaska in Port Townsend, WA, a 750 mile boat race (and the closest thing sailing has to a communal GAP Month in the United States) kicks off with a playing of the Russian National Anthem for ironic and idiosyncratic reasons. It’s dumb and confusing, but that’s part of the point on that event. Your rituals of initiation and completion can be as unreasonable as you want as long as they carry significance for you. Bonus points if they somehow capture the essence of the experience.

People often also mark important points along the way. The halfway point, or the crossing of the hardest threshold, the high point on a trail or the longest day on a bike tour. The Cruz de Ferro ritual on the Camino is a good example. Pilgrims traditionally carry stones from home, representing some type of burden, and leave them behind at a small cross near Foncebadón and the Camino’s highest point. The point is somewhat arbitrary - about three-quarters of the way through the trip - but it signifies the impact of the journey and draws attention to it midway through.

In a lot of traditions, when you’re approaching the end of your journey, you go through some kind of cleansing ritual - often a literal bath - that signifies a change from your old life and prepares you psychologically to reckon with the end of the trip.

It’s also common for pilgrims to have some kind of small ritual of recognition when important but unplanned events happen along the way. This might look like something called a “savoring ritual” - taking a moment to reflect on an important or pleasant experience in a journal, or photograph, or a small moment of mindfulness.

I’ve mentioned the Cruz de Ferro multiple times now, but whatever. It also gets at another common type of ritual that people integrate on these sorts of trips - “votive offerings.” Again, sounds religious (and it traditionally is), but that just means taking something along that you intend to leave behind. Sometimes this looks like a charitable donation or even a period of volunteer time. The idea is that it’s something that represents the transition you’ll be making. It is something you came into the trip carrying, but left behind along the way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be heavy or unpleasant. In Taoist temples, people often leave behind fruit as a votive offering to feed poor members of the community. In a lot of ancient traditions, people would leave behind something personally valuable to represent sacrifice. It might also include burning something iconic of the experience. At the end of the Camino, I threw my shoes and clothes in the trash for a variety of reasons, but partly it was a votive offering.

The final type of traditional ritual to highlight is what you could call “devotional.” For me as a post-religious person, the word devotional is triggering, but I’ll put that aside for a moment. These types of rituals are routine, and set a structure in the experience rather than marking specific events.

If you are (or have been) a religious person, you’ll recognize the day to day routine of devotional reading and prayer.

That’s a time tested strategy, and despite how it sounds, it doesn’t have to be expressly religious.

Picking an appropriate book to accompany you, and reading it along the way, can add a real depth to your experience. When my wife and I were traveling by cycle around Taiwan, we both read the book ,Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica Lee. It’s a memoir about the author’s attempt to find her place in Taiwan and understand it. For us it was a way to follow along with the author and come to understand a place that was very foreign to us more deeply, and establish a sense of personal relationship with it.

A key to finding meaning in any experience is immersing yourself in a bigger story. Picking a book (or books) to read along the way can be a way to accomplish that. You might pick a story about the place you’re going, or relevant history, or about pilgrimage generally. ,The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, for instance, or ,The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Or, if you’re looking for something really life changing, you could take along ,The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life.

If you’re not a reader, then podcasts, movies and music can accomplish similar goals.

For the religious people out there, I’d guess that prayer comes naturally. For the irreligious, I’d guess that my suggestion that you integrate daily prayer along the way arouses quite a bit of skepticism. You probably think of prayer as a way of asking some external deity to give you what you want, and expecting to receive it. If you don’t believe in an external deity, that probably seems like a waste of time.

In short, prayer’s a lot more complicated than that. Let’s not even call it prayer for the moment. Let’s just say that it helps to take a few minutes every day to bring your intention to mind and mentally re-state your hopes in life. Say it out loud if you want, with some friends, or just in your head. Call it mindfulness or meditation or taking a moment to get your head together.

This article is already getting wordy, so I’m not going to elaborate on that, but here’s a ,really useful article about non-religious prayer if you’re interested in reading more.

Other types of “devotional” rituals might include anything you do on a daily basis to give your experience structure and intention. It might be as simple as sitting for a cup of coffee every morning. It might be as banal as posting something thoughtful on social media every evening.

Conclusion

I know the prospect of inserting unusual little rituals into your previously normal, respectable trip plans can sound like a bit much.

I’m not trying to make things uncomfortable for you, but what we’re trying to get to with the GAP Month is a travel experience that’s likely to have a real impact on your life. So, it makes sense to integrate ritual.

We’re not talking about magic or religion exactly. We’re talking about using lessons learned from the history of pilgrimage, from positive psychology, and from personal experience in order to infuse your experience with meaning and good feelings.

Ritual is a simple, physical mechanism by which we make things feel meaningful.

It cements lessons learned for later, and sears experiences into your memory.

It forces you to pause occasionally and identify the bits that are meaningful.

It triggers emotions.

It connects the mundane to the bigger picture.

It marks out specific experiences as special in a way that they won’t be otherwise.

Your rituals might include some kind of visible public identifier of your status as a traveler, or personalized actions to mark out important events along the way. They might be day to day routines that give structure to the experience and keep it on track. Or they might be splashy celebrations of the trip itself when you finish.

Make it as private or public as you want. Take the advice or leave it. But if you want, think about integrating some form of ritual into your trip. It’ll make it special, it’ll make it memorable, and it will make it weird in all the right ways.

If you’re interested in reading more, I’d recommend the book ,The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile.

I’d also recommend that you ,check out the rest of the posts in the GAP Month series if you want to build your own DIY PIlgrimage.

How to travel with intention: Deciding what your trip is going to teach you

In this series, we’ve been introducing the concept of a ,GAP Month as a reliable framework for transformational travel. In short, it's a month of goal-directed adventure or pilgrimage with the following characteristics:

,You take at least one month away from home. ,You move towards a specific destination, or along a specific circuit - preferably using human power. ,You make it an adventure (that is, include some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). You set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific). You integrate some form of ritual (not necessarily religious). You go alone, but bring people along with you.

In this post we’re focusing on the personal goal: the value of knowing why you’re doing this.

TL;DR - If you know what you’re looking for, you’re much more likely to find it.

I was raised in a conservative Midwestern family of small business owners, teachers, and factory laborers.

For me, it feels weird to talk about things like “setting intentions for your transformational journey.” It smacks of spiritual-but-not-religiousity and it smells like yoga class and Gwyneth Paltrow’s candles.

Well, maybe it is weird.

But so is everything else that human beings do. Green bean casserole, for instance.

You might as well do weird stuff that makes life better (also like green bean casserole). The fact is, if you’re going on a trip and you want it to be amazing, it helps to identify a specific personal intention about what you want to get out of it.

Even for Midwestern factory laborers, there’s nothing wrong with needing something from life, and if you can identify what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it.

So yeah, it’s only weird if you make it weird.

A story about setting intentions

Because “setting an intention” is a phrase that’s picked up some baggage along the way, I want to tell you a simple story about what it looks like.

My wife Angel and I went to Greece in 2022. We planned the trip because some friends invited us to their wedding in Athens, but I knew I wanted more out of it than just a nice wedding experience (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It was our first international trip in years. We’d both turned 40 just as Covid hit. The disease grounded us after 5 years of intensive travel and killed the small business we’d been working on. I was back employed full time as a psych nurse, talking to people all day, every day about suicide. As for essentially everyone in the world, it’d been a rough couple of years.

I needed to shake some of that off. I needed to get my groove back. I needed to make sense of all of the darkness I’d been immersed in.

So I set that as my intention for Greece.

It was a vague intention, but it was an intention none the less. I decided to make Greece an international journey meant to break out of the isolation and hopelessness and stagnation brought on by the Covid lockdowns.

I didn’t do much to address that need purposely - I just thought, “This is why I’m going to Greece.”

It seems too easy, but just having the intention meant that I experienced Greece in a specific way. Throughout the trip, my mind returned to the intention again and again as different experiences triggered reflection. I knew I needed to get a sense of direction in the world again, and to get a sense of what to do with all of this malaise. Little coincidental things pieced together to help me sort that out.

Greece is an ancient place and a lot of stuff’s happened there. I hiked up Mt. Olympus, a mountain haunted by the dead gods of a lost religion. I wandered the ruins of humbled civilizations in Athens and Thessaloniki. I visited museums memorializing forgotten conquests by Alexander the Great and millenia of Greek wars and colonization and death and humiliation. I learned that all of those beautiful white buildings in the Cyclades (which you’ve almost definitely seen on Instagram) were painted that way originally to try to fight a cholera epidemic. The dictator at the time held a mistaken belief that the white wash (which contained lime) would kill the disease.

This isn’t the only lesson you could take away from a trip to Greece, but going through those generally touristy routines, a lesson stood out to me:

Bad stuff has always happened - pandemics and wars and 40 year old men struggling to make sense of their lives. History has been shitting on people for millennia.

Modern times are just same shit, different day, but with smart phones.

There’s something reassuring in that - just recognizing your normality and accepting reality as it is. But because I intended to break out of my malaise, and not just accept it, other things also stood out.

While it’s had a rocky history (and a rocky present, for that matter), I also saw that Greece was full of old men spending their days in sidewalk cafes drinking good coffee and eating spanakopita. It was friendly tourists lounging on beaches. It was classic, delicious spiced meat everywhere. It was taxi drivers telling you stories about their family’s history on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. It was colorful churches and dramatic scenery. Greece was great music and food and wine and conversation everywhere.

The Greeks are still protesting in the streets and causing active harm by doing things like rejecting refugees fleeing the war torn countries that surround them. They’re also dancing to Laiko music, laughing, drinking too much wine and giving each other Covid. Shit happens in Greece, and has for millenia, but it is still undeniably there and human and moving on with its life.

My experience of Greece wasn’t just that shit happens, it was that life also goes on in the midst of it and even expands into beauty and happiness and fun. People keep putting together meaningful lives. They keep making art and music and babies. Bad stuff happens along the way - very bad stuff even. But what can you do but make the best of it?

It’s not that specific. It’s not that profound. But that’s a lesson I needed to absorb, and did, because I went on the trip intentionally looking for some sort of slap in the face.

Life felt sucky when I left.

I asked Greece to teach me how to break out of that.

Greece communicated simply and beautifully that when life sucks, the thing to do is to keep living.

That was the outcome of my intention.

Would I have experienced Greece differently if I’d had a different intention? Probably, I’d guess. If I were looking for reconnection with nature or an experience of transcendence, I probably would’ve approached the trip differently. Or, I probably would remember different things about the same experiences. Maybe I’d be thinking now about how all the cultures in the world have been impacted by Greece, and my own cultural roots were tied in some way to those dead gods on Olympus? Maybe I’d be thinking about the smallness of human existence in the face of history and the natural world? Who knows?

Did the trip help me break out of my funk? I think so. When I came back home I scaled back my hours at work and went to a few writing conferences. I went on a road trip, and I started planning more international trips with Angel, I started training for a half-marathon. In short, I reset after a difficult period and started getting back to living. I’m not sure I had any dramatic emotional revelations, but my perspective was gently but assertively reset in a valuable way. Greece helped me shake off stagnation and inertia of isolation and malaise and get on with it.

—

Greece is awesome, and I’m sure I would’ve had a good trip even if I hadn’t set any intentional goals, but travel is a bit like thrift shopping. It’s true that if you go and aren’t looking for anything in particular, you’re still likely to find something to be excited about it. But if you have something specific in mind you’ll be more likely to spot it because you’ll have your eyes open.

It’s a simple point about travel and life: if you decide to look for something, you’ll be more likely to find it.

That’s what I mean by setting a personal intention when you travel. Define what you want to get out of your trip. Keep your eyes open for it. Think about it when you feel like it. Journal or write or whatever. Just establish ,your mindset and define what you want to experience. The world will help you progress towards the goal.

What kind of intentions might you set?

As you’re trying to identify your intention, it’s worth thinking about the types of things that a trip might be useful for.

Another way to think about it: what kinds of problems might a GAP Month solve? If you take an intentional month away from your routine, what can you reasonably expect to accomplish?

Well, I mean, lots of things, but if you look into the history and modern reality of pilgrimage, it’s possible to come up with some specific categories of usefulness. There are at least six types of pilgrimage, and all of them are aimed at dealing with different types of problems.

I’m stealing these categories shamelessly from Dave Whitson’s book ,Pilgrimage: A Medieval Cure for Modern Ills. In turn, he took them from Alan Morinis’ ,Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of PIlgrimage. I’m not sure where Alan got them but let’s assume he did his research since he’s an academic with a PhD from Oxford.

These categories are maybe going to reinforce the feeling that “setting intentions” is for weirdos because of all of the spiritual and/or academic language, but bear with me and I’ll translate into human-ese.

My goal here is to give you some examples to help you identify the problems you might solve, and the intentions that you might set personally.

So, I’ll list the categories of pilgrimage as defined in academic terms, and then I’ll give you the translation so it’ll be easier to think about why they might be relevant for you.

The types of pilgrimage and their purposes.

1) In devotional pilgrimage, the goal is to encounter God or earn favor with the spirits. El Camino de Santiago was traditionally this type of pilgrimage, and still is for many people.

Translation: Call it God or don’t. Classically, it’s been recognized that pilgrimage can help you experience something bigger than yourself. That helps you set your path more confidently. It helps you get perspective and clarify your values and beliefs. Pilgrimage is also useful for achieving “enlightenment” - which is just a way of saying that it helps you figure out what’s important in life, or sort out the path through some particular challenge.

2) Instrumental pilgrimage is about solving a concrete problem - like seeking a cure for illness. The pilgrimages to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico and to Lourdes, France are active modern examples. People go looking for healing for specific ailments.

Translation: Pilgrimage can help people deal with actual, physical illnesses or injuries. I’m not sure it’ll actually cure you, but it’s worth a shot. More importantly, a lot of times the “cure” just means that the pilgrim comes to terms with their reality in a way that helps them suffer less. A good trip can help you move from a place of psychic suffering to acceptance and peace. A lot of people who go on walking pilgrimages on the Camino de Santiago list “physical fitness” as a goal. I’d include this here too. A long physical journey can be about getting healthy when you feel that you aren’t. A month of movement is very good for that.

3) Normative pilgrimages are annual traditions that occur at a specific time. During the Dajia Mazu pilgrimage in Taiwan, for example, every Spring, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims process a statue of the sea goddess Mazu hundreds of kilometers through the country to a specific temple near the coast. Another variation on this theme are pilgrimages that are attached to specific moments in life - like old age. In both cases, the idea is that most everyone in your culture does it at the same time - either the same time of year or the same time of life.

Translation: Pilgrimage can be used to address the need for connection with your culture. It can be participation in a community event. It can tie you in to sense of being part of something bigger than yourself - but that’s a specifically communal and traditional thing vs. something abstract like “God.” It can be a cultural ritual and a way to connect with your history and community. It’s everyone doing something together. In modern, secular America, thru-hikes often take on something like this purpose - with masses of hikers starting each Spring, walking North together on the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails.

4) Obligatory pilgrimage is expected to occur at some point in life by requirement. The Hajj in Islam is the most famous example. (It’s the most famous pilgrimage of any sort, actually.) Another variation on this theme are pilgrimages that were prescribed for penance or punishment by a spiritual leader - this was very common in Medieval Christianity, for instance. They’re trips that are prescribed vs. voluntary.

Translation: While your priest probably won’t force you to go on a GAP Month trip, pilgrimage has been required in religion because there’s a sense that these types of trips are effective to correct certain kinds of wrongs. That might be something you did or something that was done to you, or just something inherent in who you are. It’s a way to grind away the stuff you don’t like about yourself or get right with the world. It’s purification. You leave one person, and for some reason you come back someone slightly better. You use the time to get your shit together.

5) Initiatory pilgrimages are rites of passage into a new stage of life. The Native American “Vision Quest” tradition fits this model, as a physical and spiritual journey that young males took on upon achieving adulthood.

Translation: A trip can be a way to mark and facilitate a transition into a new stage of life. It’s not just a stamp on your passport. It’s a way to actually figure out who you’re going to be now that you’re (divorced/a parent/widowed/an adult/poor/wealthy/a college graduate). It’s also a way to move yourself beyond thought patterns that no longer serve you now that your life has changed. It’s not about becoming a new person. It’s about becoming yourself in a new situation.

6) Wandering pilgrimage: Here the goal is to wander - not to get to a fixed site. These types of pilgrimages have been completed by monks and nuns in various religions with a lot of time on their hands. You could say that this is what Jesus was doing out there in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. It’s also often in the spirit of what backpackers get up to these days on their OEs.

Translation: Pilgrimage works if you don’t know what you need, but you know you need something. Wandering is about this, I think? Maybe what you need is openness to experience. I met a person on the Pacific Crest Trail who was “only saying yes” along the way, so they had been fried on drugs. Not setting boundaries is a terrible idea but they were hitting on a tradition there - openness to experience has a real value and pilgrimage can teach you lessons you didn’t know you needed to learn. Wandering can follow a specific route or it can involve drifting, but philosophically it’s about openness to what comes.

One trip isn’t going to solve all of your problems. Also, I’ve distilled the entire history of pilgrimage into six bullet points on a blog, so this is a gross oversimplification.

But the point is that there are certain problems that a GAP Month might be particularly useful at addressing. It might help you connect with something bigger than yourself, and this might help you set a better course in life. It might help you cope with a literal, physical problem - or make you physically healthier. It might help you connect with your community and history. It might help you get your act together or right a wrong in your life. It might help you make a transition from an old life stage into a new one. It might help you identify the problem when it feels like something’s off, and it might teach you lessons that you didn’t even know that you needed to learn.

It’s not a universal cure, but it’s a pretty solid intervention for some of life’s most complicated problems.

While I’ve divided pilgrimage into different types, in fact most trips take on characteristics of multiple categories. You don’t have to pick just one. You can have both enlightenment and stronger legs, and you can absorb new, unexpected experiences while also participating in a journey that people in your community have undertaken for centuries. Pilgrimage has endured as a practice in diverse cultures with diverse motivations because it works for all of those purposes.

How to set your own intention - in brief

You don’t have to pick one of the intentions we’ve just covered, or you could pick more than one if you want. But now you have a starting point for identifying your intention if it wasn’t set already. It doesn’t have to be that concrete - as you can see - and you don’t need to overthink it. You probably already know what your intention would be, at some level.

“Follow your gut” isn’t always the best advice, but in this case I think it is.

What’s making you interested in this sort of travel? Why do you keep reading these GAP month articles? What’s life serving up that you don’t know how to handle?

Simply put, what do you want to get out of this?

Start there, keep an open mind, and go with it. Things might change along the way, but having a set intention will point you in a specific, useful direction.

When you pick an intention, what can you expect the process of to be like?

After you’ve set an intention, and you head out on your trip, what should you actually expect?

Well, concretely, it’s like this:

Every day, toddling along you think about your problem for a while. You get sick of it and stop. Then you think about other things. Then something triggers you that is relevant to the problem, and helps you see your situation in a different light. Then you go back and think more. You have a coffee. You write down some thoughts or have a conversation about it with a stranger. You get sick of thinking about your problems and go on to something else. You’re reading a book to pass the time and when your mind is in a totally different place, you notice that the book hits on your intention. You underline a sentence or two. You tweet it out even. You go back to that problem when you have another trigger and repeat the process. After a long period of time things click together like a puzzle. At the end of the trip, you may not have all the answers - but then again, you may. At worst you will have new perspective and a new plan of attack. Or maybe you realize your problem wasn’t such a big problem at all. Or maybe it is, but you’ll realize that you have to accept it.

There’s a classic picture of the pilgrim struggling to the mountain top, finding the guru, and achieving enlightenment. I’m not sure that’s how this works.

It’s normal for people to go into these types of experiences hoping for something, then worry that they’re not doing it right when they don’t have some type of mountain top experience. Sometimes those come, and it’s awesome, but they often don’t. That doesn’t mean the process isn’t working.

No matter what intention you set, it’s best to expect something like my experience in Greece. Maybe you won’t have a single moment of revelation or Nirvana, but a series of lessons along the way will contribute to your progress. Expect something more like an experiential educational process than a ‘shroom trip or a religious conversion. Your intention will give your trip a cognitive framework and will shape the process into something productive.

Think of a GAP Month like lazy therapy or passive spirituality or embodied problem solving.

Eventually in some way or another the journey gets you through.

Your intention will help you make progress on your journey, and your journey will help you make progress on your intention.

Conclusion

“Setting intentions” can sound weird at the start, but it’s really just about identifying your personal goal. It doesn’t have to be fully sorted when you leave, but it helps to have something in mind. The history of pilgrimage can give you some guidance about what types of problems this sort of trip might be good for. Follow along with the types of goals that people have been pursuing for centuries. Or don’t, and see what happens. In any case, an intention will give your trip a theme and a purpose to keep you moving, and will infuse the experience with meaning and insight. Along with the other features of the GAP Month we’ve been discussing, it’ll help guarantee that the experience works. That is - and sorry if this sounds weird - it’ll make sure that the experience is life-changing.

As with all of the features of the GAP model, setting an intention is useful on its own, but it’s best done in conjunction with the other bits of the framework. If you want to read more on those, link from the menu above or go back to the ,GAP Month introduction .

Why do people go on adventures? It's so simple that even a child could understand.

In this series, we've been discussing the concept of a ,GAP Month as a reliable framework for transformational travel. In short, it's a month of goal-directed adventure or pilgrimage with the following characteristics:

,You take at least one month away from home. ,You move towards a specific destination, or along a specific circuit - preferably using human power. You make it an adventure (that is, include some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). You set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific). You integrate some form of ritual (not necessarily religious). You go alone, but bring people along with you.

If you follow those rules, it'll probably change your life.

In this post we’re focusing on the benefits of adventure.

In summary, adventure is important because it’s just playing around.

I’ll spare you the long version of this story because I babble about it all the time, but even if you’ve heard it before, bear with me. There’s a unique point and I swear I’ll get to it quickly.

When I turned thirty, I got really into adventure. It progressed quickly, but first it was relatively small stuff: signing up for a short triathlon and learning to cold water swim in Lake Washington in Seattle (hated it). Then it was a trip to Victoria, BC in order to run a five mile race (loved it). Then a half-marathon. Then Angel and I impulsively committed to fly to Rome to run a marathon. After that we picked up trail running and headed out every weekend with the Seattle Running Club to see if we could go further than the week before. That progressed into ultramarathons, and then running across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, which led to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, paddling the Hudson, backpacking around Latin America and more.

In all of that, the fundamental thing that kept (and keeps) me going was that it was fun. Adventures, big or small, are almost always a good time. Pursuing adventures regularly made life feel a lot more enjoyable than it had been during my previous lethargic and career-driven eras. It feels like dumb, pure hedonism at times. By pursuing adventure, you’re just pursuing joy and fun.

At the same time though, I could see that integrating regular adventure was rapidly and objectively improving my life. It made me much healthier physically, but I was also getting more assertive, making new friends, and sorting out how to deal with old issues and insecurities without even really trying. I was getting better at work, thinking more creatively, and feeling more motivation to do important things in the world. I didn’t get into adventure because I was looking for personal transformation per se, but it came naturally. That gave me even more motivation to keep going. It felt revelatory. It seemed impossible almost - something that was pure fun that also made me happier and healthier and a better human being.

Simply stated, that’s what I’m trying to help you experience by talking through the GAP Month concept. No matter the duration, when you’re trying to create a transformative travel experience intentionally, you’re aiming for that magic. You’re aiming to create a fun experience that will also shape you into a better person.

So, you’re aiming for an adventure.

What is an adventure?

Adventure is like obscenity, right? It’s one of those concepts that’s difficult to define, but you know it when you see it? It’s Indiana Jones, or rafting the Grand Canyon, or climbing a mountain in a snow storm. It’s not watching Netflix or working in an office or spending the next four hours binge reading all of my blog posts.

True, sure, but I do think that you can define adventure relatively concisely if you want to. I stole this from ,this article in Big Life Magazine, but you can say that an adventure is a time-limited experience that involves risk, effort, excitement and the unknown. It’s a hard, fun activity that you engage in where you aren’t sure about the outcome, and where there’s at least an off chance that something bad might happen as a result.

It’s an enticing challenge during which you might accidentally break your arm.

But what’s the point of adventure?

Concise definitions can be useful, but also boring because they don’t really tell the whole story. They don’t get to the meaty bits.

Sometimes analogies are better, so maybe a better way to think about adventure is that It’s just play for adults.

Stepping back for a moment, why do kids play? There are a lot of reasons, but it boils down to the fact that it’s how they learn to be humans, right? It’s true that when you’re a kid, you play because it’s fun and intuitive. But it’s not just about the fun, functionally speaking. It involves managing danger and socialization and creativity and physical movement and all of the things you need to be able to do in order to survive as an adult human. Play is how you learn all of that important stuff.

If you ask the experts at places like the ,British Government about what play accomplishes for children, they’ll say things like:

“Play improves the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and young people.

Through play, children learn about the world and themselves.

They also learn skills they need for study, work and relationships such as:

Confidence, self-esteem, resilience, interaction, social skills, independence, curiosity, coping with challenging situations…good physical fitness, agility, stamina, coordination, balance and… [complex social skills.]”

When we’re kids, we enjoy playing, and that’s probably because evolution wired us that way. The things we need to do in order to survive have to be more enjoyable than things we don’t, or we’d die. As kids we’re hardwired to enjoy play because we’re hardwired to learn and grow.

Adults play less often than children presumably because we have less to learn, but the need is still there. There are still times when we run into obstacles that we don’t know how to navigate, or our confidence in our ability to manage new challenges diminishes. There’s always plenty to learn about how to be a human.

I would like to humbly submit that this is what adventure is for.

Play and adventure - they’re both fun, but they’re also about pushing boundaries and learning new skills and learning what you’re capable of. They help establish social status, build relationships and new degrees of confidence. Ultimately they keep you growing and help you function as an adult human.

They’re both about risk, effort, excitement and the unknown.

That’s why it makes complete sense, if you’re looking for personal growth, to organize an experience that involves adventure.

Or if you like, to do something that’s basically just a long period of playing around.

What does an adventure actually look like, concretely?

When people write adventure stories, they often follow a structure called ,The Hero’s Journey, and a good way to visualize what an adventure might look like in your own life is to briefly consider this structure.

It’s complex, and there are ,long, dense, academic books written about it, but you can simplify a Hero’s Journey story into five steps if you’d like.

You’re living your normal life. Something happens that sucks you into a challenge. You face down the challenge, identifying personal strengths and supportive people that help you overcome it along the way. Eventually you make it through, and learn a lot in the process. Afterwards, you go back to your normal life changed by the experience in some way or another.

Simple, right?

Here’s a real life example from my own experience - a kayaking trip we took down the Hudson in 2018. It’s a dashed off Hero’s Journey in very brief.

Normal life: I was browsing at Barnes and Noble and came across ,a book by a guy who’d paddled from the Great Lakes to New York CIty via the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. We’d just bought folding kayaks but hadn’t taken them out yet, and had very little paddling experience in general. I didn’t buy the book but it piqued my interest. I moved on with life.

Call to adventure: A few weeks later, an East Coast friend invited us to run the Ragnar Relay in Cape Cod. That’s not that far from Albany, NY, which is essentially the start of the flat portion of the Hudson. My brother was living in NYC. “Hey Angel, want to make a real adventure of this?”

Facing the challenge: In a few months we found ourselves at the start of the Hudson, putting in our brand new folding kayaks loaded with all of our gear. We were sent off by a local who we’d met on Warm Showers who was excited about our adventure and committed to meet us down the way. He gave us advice on the journey and took the photo you see above.

Within an hour, I’d managed to smash a foot-long hole in the side of my kayak. We’d gotten off the river to let a massive shipping boat pass and take a quick break. I stepped out of the kayak onto a water chestnut (which looks like one of those spiky things ninjas throw on the ground to thwart their enemies). While I was cursing and prying it out of my foot, the wake from the ship picked up my kayak and slammed it into a nearby log. It popped like a balloon. Foot long gash below the water line right in the center of the boat.

We were a mile’s bushwhack from a road, and we would’ve been humiliated to have to call our new local friend anyway. So, we hatched a ridiculous plan and created a DIY patch for the massive hole using Gorilla Tape and superglue. I held my breath and we put back in, expecting to have to swim the Hudson’s polluted waters back to shore at any minute.

Overcoming the challenge: The patch held. We met our friend halfway and told him the story. He thought it was hilarious. After 10 days battling wind and tide, bandit camping in bushes, sheltering from lightning storms, and exploring the Hudson’s historic villages, we finished our trip at Croton-on-Hudson where we packed our folding kayaks and caught the train into the city, victorious.

Going back home: Back home in Seattle, we wrote a message to the the manufacturer of the kayak about the situation. They didn’t care or offer repair or replacement. We wrote a separate message to ,Gorilla and they sent us a big box with hundreds of dollars worth of tape and glue and shared our story around. I guess we know who our friends are. I got a weird rash from the Hudson but we also learned a lot about both paddle excursions and the history of New York along the way. We fell in love with the Hudson Valley. We felt much more confident in our water skills and used them sea kayaking with humpbacks in remote Alaska a year later. We felt victorious for having executed a successful marine field repair with duct tape. We never fully trusted those folding kayaks again though. We were changed.

Your adventure will be different from ours, but that’s roughly what I’m getting at. That arc is what you can aim to replicate in your own experience.

(Maybe this dumb post is your call to adventure?)

How do you design your own adventure?

The idea with the GAP Month concept is that if you follow the basic rules of the game, everything will work together without requiring an inordinate amount of thinking on your part.

So, simply enough, in order to experience your own Hero’s Journey, all you really need to do is take a bit of time. Start where you are and pick somewhere else to move towards. Ideally, figure out how to get there under human power. Ideally, integrate some rituals and personal goals and friends. The universe will provide the challenges for you to overcome along the way. All that’s required of you is to commit to moving through the process.

If you want to make sure that you suck the marrow out of the experience, be intentional about incorporating some of the things that make adventure transformative: risk, effort, excitement and the unknown.

Test your boundaries and try something that you’re not sure you can accomplish. Go somewhere or do something intimidating. Don’t take it easy on yourself, physically or emotionally.

Incorporate some degree of physical or financial risk, to the degree you can stomach.

Go somewhere that you don’t know well, or take on a type of activity that you aren’t expert in.

And make sure it’s fun. Make sure it’s something you actually want to do.

Maybe that’ll mean flying to Patagonia to navigate an off trail wilderness circuit, or maybe it’ll mean creating a walking route that starts and finishes in your own backyard. There’s no real bar to clear other than to push yourself and make it fun.

Play like a kid and learn to be an adult.

In conclusion, what should you expect to result from an adventure?

As a concise description of what results you can expect from taking on adventure, there’s a great in that article I noted above in ,BigLife Magazine:

“Through intentionally pushing us out of our comfort zone, adventure demands we stand at the edge of who we think we are…and look out over the exciting new territory of who we could be if we learned to embrace risk, embrace effort, embrace the unknown. Adventure inspires us to be more, do more, live more, while sowing the seeds of those changes within us.”

It’s dramatic, but it’s nice. Through adventure, you’ll grow, you’ll experience life, you’ll gain confidence, and you’ll be confident to take on even bigger challenges after you’re done.

It’s great.

It’s fun.

It’s the same sort of stuff that you used to get as a kid by playing outside with your friends.

All you have to do is identify the goal and attempt to tackle it. Life will provide you with the rest.

Back to the ,GAP Month introduction (in case you missed it).

Pilgrimage means finding a place with a good story and moving your ass towards it.

We've ,introduced the concept of a GAP Month as a reliable framework for transformational travel. In short, it's a month of goal-directed adventure or pilgrimage with the following characteristics:

Take at least one month away from home Move towards a specific destination, or along a specific circuit - preferably using human power. Make it an adventure (that is, include some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). Set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific). Integrate some form of ritual (not necessarily religious). Go alone, but bring people along with you.

In this post we’re focusing on movement towards a specific destination - not the personal one yet but the physical goal.

In summary, if you're looking for a transformative trip, it’s both the journey and the destination.

When it comes to organizing a transformational travel experience, is it the journey or the destination that matters?

The answer is yes.

Where you go will determine the impact of your experience.

How you get there will matter just as much.

Let’s talk about it.

Pilgrimage is about the destination, not the journey

The question “Why does it matter where you go when you travel?” seems a little bit silly. The answer is obvious, right?

You go to a place because it has what you’re looking for.

If you’re looking to relax for a week, you go to the beach and sit on lounge chairs sipping Mai Tais. If you want to go hiking, you head to the mountains and set out on trail. If you want to experience culture, food and entertainment, you catch a bus to the big city.

All that’s true, and it is a silly question. It’s just that in relation to life-changing travel, the answer isn’t quite as simple as it may be for a standard vacation.

In fact, the answer is confusing and takes some explanation, even if I can state it in a sentence:

If you’re looking for a transformative travel experience, what you need is a destination that has a good story.

I’ll pull back for a moment and explain what I mean, because that probably doesn’t make any sense.

Pilgrimage and Story

Every place has a story. Every town came to be somehow, and every mountain means something to someone.

Some of those stories have become widely important and meaningful. The Delaware River, for instance, became important to a lot of people when Washington crossed it to take on the British (and when some German guy named Leutze painted the scene).

A way to think about all of the world’s classic pilgrimage sites: they’re all places with stories attached that a lot of people find meaningful.

Millions of people visit the Bodh Gaya and the Bodhi Tree in India because there’s a story that the Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting there.

The Camino de Santiago is the most popular long walk in the world because there is a story that God uniquely blessed a strange corner of Spain with his apostle’s remains, and those who visit can be blessed themselves. (By the way, that picture above is myself and some fellow pilgrims, only a few meters from St. James' bones at Santiago de Compostela.)

Some places are meaningful, but to far fewer people. I would imagine that there are locations in your own life that are significant to you, but almost no one else? The place where you first met your partner? Or the place where you decided to end the relationship? The location of your first job? Or the place where you celebrated your retirement? Those might be important locations for you because of the stories associated with them, even if no one else is aware.

Places take on a sense of importance to people. They represent things. It’s not just about the location, per se. It’s the story behind it.

All of that makes sense, right?

Story and Meaning

Every person also has a story. We all have a lot of stories, actually. Everyone you know has a story about you, and you have a story that you tell about yourself that defines your identity. It’s that story about yourself that is crucially important.

Emily Esfahani-Smith, in her brilliant book ,The Power of Meaning, said that people who self-report a deep sense of meaning in life are able to construct a coherent story about themselves and how their life fits in with the bigger picture of the universe.

Think about an electrician who genuinely loves their work and would never think of changing career paths. How would you imagine that they got to that point? They probably like the day to day tasks, sure, but if they’re really committed it must be more than that, right? Maybe their father was also an electrician who put in long hours to pull his family out of poverty and continuing the work is a way to honor his legacy. Maybe our hypothetical electrician knows that they play a key role in maintaining their town’s safety because they ensure that buildings don’t burn down, life-support systems in the hospital stay in operation, and families have access to heat in the winter. Maybe our electrician is a member of the IBEW and sees their union activity as part of a crucial movement to protect working class folks from exploitation by people with money and power. Maybe all of those things are true, so our electrician finds their work deeply fulfilling and beautiful.

Their life satisfaction isn’t just about enjoying tinkering with wires, right? Their story is that they’re carrying on an important family legacy, keeping their community safe and fighting tyranny in the process.

If our electrician wins awards or gets promoted at work, all the better. They add elements to the story - about how this has been a path that’s given them success and prosperity alongside everything else.

Meaningful, fulfilling lives are constructed from stories like this.

Conversely, life’s major crises are often points at which that story gets undermined. When something screws up the story we tell about ourselves, it can cause major disruption in our sense of meaning and identity.

Imagine that our electrician lost his job because he turned up drunk at work. Or imagine that a building burned down after he wired it. Who is he then? What’s he supposed to do now?

That’s what I mean about the story thing. As much as any other factor, the stories we tell about ourselves determine our sense of meaning in life. If they’re disrupted, it creates a crisis and drives us to do things like hire a therapist, take up cannabis or lay in bed for weeks.

Or to go on a pilgrimage.

Transformative travel and story

When it comes to travel, what you’re looking for, really, if you’re looking for transformation, is a location whose story is significant enough that it’ll impact your own story about yourself.

Another way of saying it is that you should think about going to a location that will really mean something to you.

Ideally, it’ll be a place that represents what you’re looking for from this experience (if you know what it is that you’re looking for).

That place might be an established pilgrimage destination, or it might be might be somewhere personally significant. The important thing is that you’ll have the potential to tell a different story about yourself after you go there.

This is simple enough to imagine. Here’s a hypothetical example:

Right now, the story you tell about yourself is that you’re a person who feels lost and directionless, sitting in (let’s say), South Carolina out of work.

If you play your cards right though, in one month, after the trip you’ve been planning, your story will be that you are a person who felt lost and directionless. At a moment of joblessness and crisis, you did something really remarkable, and spent a month seeking new understanding by cycling from Quito to your family’s ancestral home in the mountains of Ecuador.

These are two very different self-conceptions, and the second story might even supplant the first. You might replace directionlessness with a new sense of identity and purpose, because you might gain a new understanding of how you fit in to your family, your culture, and your history. Your shame about your joblessness might be replaced by your pride about your bravery in taking on this adventure. Your story about what makes your life meaningful might even be shifted as you gain a different understanding of where you came from and who your family is.

This is the sort of thing we’re aiming for with the GAP concept. Life change through picking a good place to go on a trip..

There are ,a lot of established destinations that represent things that you might be looking for, but it’s good to remember that the possibilities are endless.

Maybe you’ve gone through some deeply unjust experience, so you need to go somewhere that represent justice? Maybe your destination is the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile?

Maybe you’ve recognized that the constant barrage of biased media about Mexico has created a prejudice in yourself that you aren’t happy with, and you want to address it. Maybe a cycle tour between the cathedrals of central Mexico will change that?

Maybe life feels mundane and you’re seeking a sense of transcendence? Maybe you put together a walking circuit of sacred grottos in Ireland?

Maybe you’ve lost faith in your own culture and community? Maybe you put together a tour of significant cultural and historical sites in your home state and set out on a journey run?

The point is that after you’ve gone on your trip, you’ll have added a significant chapter to your story. You’ll experience a place that means something, and as a result your own story will be different than it was when you left.

I hope all of this makes sense. The point is that what your destination represents matters, because it will shape what you get from the experience.

What if you pick the wrong destination?

The last thing I’ll say about choosing your destination is that I gotta admit that it might not matter THAT much if you pick the right place.

This is a purely anecdotal point, based on my own experiences on the Camino de Santiago and on Cycle Route 1 in Taiwan.

In both cases, the destination was essentially an arbitrary choice that ended up being significant because the trips incorporated all of the other GAP principles.

I went on the Camino de Santiago in large part because a few friends invited Angel and I. The timing was right, and we’re always up for an adventure, so we went.

The Camino is a magical experience with all of the key elements of pilgrimage built in, but for most people through history it has represented connection with God or something transcendent. At the time of our trip, I was going through the process of leaving my faith behind, so in my mind, Santiago represented exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. The thing is, the experience worked. When I made it to the end, I felt a real sense of closure on the religious part of my life. It cemented my departure from faith in a way that I hadn’t planned or expected. The traditional rite of hugging a statue of the saint at the end felt like a hug goodbye to me, and it’s what I needed - even if many of the people around me felt like they were communing with God.

I rode a circuit around Taiwan on Cycle Route 1 because flights to Taiwan were cheap and Angel and I were looking for a place to spend our birthday month. We realized there was a cycling circuit you could complete in a few weeks around the island, so we went. It happened to be the case that there were dozens of temples to trigger reflection along the way, and it happened to be the case that the trip came at a point in life where an intention was obvious - to reconnect with the adventurous part of our personalities and to re-establish some of our lost physical fitness. So, the trip became a pilgrimage.

So I guess I should say, don’t stress too much. If you follow GAP principles, your experience will take on meaning.

There are plenty of fish in the pilgrimage sea. You don’t have to go to New Zealand if you want to develop a sense of connection to the natural world. You could spend a month paddling the waterways of your home state, You don’t have to go to Rome to develop a sense of grounding in human history. You could spend a month walking between museums and key historic sites in your own city.

I personally don’t think there are magic places in the world. The expectation of transformation matters more than the specific location. So don’t stress too terribly much.

Transformation is about the journey, not the destination.

We’ve talked about the importance of your destination, now let’s talk about how you’re going to get there.

To start, let’s just get one thing straight. The literal, physical journey matters, even if other people might present alternative visions of what makes travel transformational.

For instance, when I think of life-changing travel experiences, ,Eat, Pray, Love is the first thing that comes to mind. Why? It’s a good story that’s been marketed well, and it seems romantic. What happened in that book? Elizabeth Gilbert was in crisis after a divorce, so she organized a trip and spent a year between three different locations: Italy, India, and Bali. During that year she spent a bunch of time in self-reflection, focusing on specific areas of life and particular types of experiences (pleasure, spirituality and balance, if you’re wondering.). She studied under a few gurus in order to learn the ways of the world. It’s a pleasantly readable bible in the self-help retreat model of midlife crisis coping. And it was very much about the power of the destination. Not as much the journey - at least physically speaking.

Before you get mad at me, I’m not against that sort of thing. Some of my own trips have taken that form across the years - most obviously trips Angel and I took to Guatemala and Bolivia. In each case we signed up with a language school and immersed ourselves in the local cultures for a month. They were awesome experiences. There’s no better way to learn a language, and immersion is the best way to get to know a place. It’s the slow travel craze, and I’m all for it.

But since we’re aiming at transformative travel here, instead of Eat, Pray, Love, if you can I’d encourage you to Walk, Bike, or Run.

Why? Because human powered travel is the most time-honored form of transformative travel. It’s uncomplicated and reliable. I’m sure that it works.

In hiker terms, don’t get vortexed. Go on a trip that’s either a point to point or a loop.

In normal people terms, if you’re looking for transformation, pick a specific physical destination and move towards it under human power.

Or, pick a specific physical circuit and move around it under human power. Temple to temple, or town to town, or monument to monument.

In other words, (ahem) organize a Goal-directed Adventure or Pilgrimage for a month or so.

Don’t worry, you can still Eat, Pray and Love along the way if you want. (And If you want a blockbuster new-agey spiritual model for the experience, there are plenty. Try ,The Alchemist or ,The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho, for a start.)

And if physical or other limitations are a barrier, it’s still possible to make Drive, Train or Bus work, particularly if you integrate the other characteristics of transformative travel that we’ve been talking about.

Why human power is uniquely effective in transformational travel

You don’t have to go bonkers. You don’t have to grind yourself into the ground. You can if you want, but the point is that you should make human powered movement towards your goal a primary part of the experience if you’re trying to change your life. You can make distances as short or as long as you like, but a GAP Month is in large part about the magic of human movement.

Other than to point out that what we’re looking for is an experience of being an actual living, breathing human, I don’t think there’s one unifying reason that using your body as your means of transportation works. There are a lot of reasons, and they all work together to make a case for human power.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are five of the most important.

I made the argument in a previous post that what you’re looking for with this sort of experience is disruption: that is, an experience that will be significantly different from your normal day to day existence. In Dave Whitson’s book ,Pilgrimage: A Medieval Cure for Modern Ills, he made the depressing but undeniable point that the phrase “We sit inside” is perhaps the most concise way of describing life in the modern world. Human powered travel is a dramatic departure from that lifestyle. It’s a step away from existence defined by technology and shelter, towards a month immersed in physicality. Moving along outside on a bike or your feet or a kayak is an immersion experience in reality. The outdoors, nature, culture and history will hit you in the face on a regular basis. You’ll get direct exposure to experiences of transcendence, to discomfort, to the natural world, and to real, live people. Walking. Cycling. Paddling. Running. All facilitate that. Sailing? Yeah - it’s pretty good too. Motorcycles? Kind of. Trains? Maybe. Driving, less so. Flying, not at all. Humans are physical beings. Doing physical activity produces internal experiences. It produces endorphins and endocannabinoids and other hormones that make us feel certain ways. The relaxing rhythm of walking or pedaling or paddling leads to passive reflection. The focus on the physical allows for the background noise in our minds to quiet. Movement across time puts us in a specific physical state that impacts our mental state. In short, doing repetitive, slow human movement ,helps us think On a similar note, doing the same thing every day is boring, and there’s value in that. If you haven’t done something like this before, it’s hard to appreciate just how much of your time will be spent either zoning out or focusing on simple, immediate issues like how much your feet hurt, how much your shirt stinks, or how to avoid crashing into a rock. That dynamic can lead to a sense of boredom in the moment, but it’s an important part of the process. Boredom allows your unconscious brain to integrate ideas unconsciously for hours at a time, and engages you in a process of “,deliberation without attention” which some psychologists believe creates an environment where epiphanies can occur, particularly when you’re dealing with problems that you’re struggling to solve consciously. Bumbling along, thinking about nothing is classically the time when people come to their most important realizations. A GAP Month should allow for a lot of that. Physical journeys, by their nature, hammer home their own lessons about what’s important in life. Adopting a lifestyle that primarily involves paddling, eating and camping along the side of the Mississippi reduces life down to the most basic requirements. Having to carry what you need forces you to reduce your belongings to the most simple needs. There’s a daily dilemma of deciding whether each thing you’re carrying is worth the weight. When you eventually sort it out, it feels like a revelation. Two lessons you’ll absorb if you do this for long enough are that a person doesn’t need much to be content, and most things you carry don’t actually make life better. Finally, overcoming a physical challenge provides an enduring sense of agency that is applicable to other aspects of life. If you can hike for a month straight, it’s not hard to convince yourself that you can do other hard things as well. It’s an objective experience that will stick, and will wire your brain to believe that you can manage whatever life throws at you. We’ll talk about this a bit more when we get around to discussing adventure as an element of the GAP Month formula.

All of that together makes physical journeys reliable. You can be sure that under an extended period of human powered movement you’ll experience deep reflection, you’ll feel both alive and uncomfortable in ways you don’t in normal life, you’ll overcome challenges that will carry lessons for life back home, and you’ll naturally absorb lessons about what you actually need to survive and feel content. While you could book a month at a retreat center in Indonesia and end up hating it, a month of physical movement even in Winnipeg is sure to be transformative and trigger revelations.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more to be said about the importance of the journey and the destination, but I’ve already hit you with a lot in this post, so that’s where we’re going to leave things at the moment.

To put it simply, if you want a travel experience that’s guaranteed to be transformative:

Pick a destination that represents something important to you, and possibly to others. Pick a means of getting there that will change you in and of itself.

Or, in other words, find a place with a good story, and move your ass towards it.

Those are time-tested, reliable features of transformative travel.

Back to the ,GAP Month introduction (in case you missed it).

,Here’s a growing list of suggested destinations/circuits

Take a month off and it'll change your life: Messing things up enough to make a difference.

If you’re going to travel, you might as well do it right. (Right?)

That's why we're here. This is part two in a series on the concept of a GAP Month - a month of Goal-directed Adventure or Pilgrimage - as a reliable framework for transformational travel.

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Travel that’s likely to change your life? Sounds complicated, but if you ask the pilgrimage scholars, you can actually put together a simple "How to" list:

Take at least one month away from home. Move towards a specific destination or along a set circuit (preferably using a human powered means of travel). Involve adventure (that is, some level of risk, effort, excitement and the unknown). Set a personal goal or expectation (which doesn’t have to be that specific) Integrate some form of ritual (which doesn't have to be religious). Work in the community so you aren’t just going alone.

This post we’re focusing on the first point - the month away.

In summary, it's not so much about the length of the trip as the value of disrupting your normal life.

Why do you need to get away? So you can change.

It's a fundamental question about travel. Why do we need to get away?

The more important question is: why do people change, and how’s that relate to travel?

A basic point of adult learning and emotional development is that adults don't normally change all that much. Our genetics determine the parameters of our personalities at birth, then our experiences as children and teenagers mould our brains into a roughly final form, and by the times we become adults our patterns are set. We settle on a track and follow it. Across time there's some gradual drift in our interests and priorities, but if our patterns and behaviors are working we typically don't stress and life moves along comfortably.

Until there's disruption.

Something happens in life that shakes things up and wakes you up to the fact that your life strategies are problematic, and that you need to do the hard work to change them. Your partner leaves you. You lose your job. You're diagnosed with a chronic illness.

Academics describe this experience in different ways. Piaget talked about the experience of ,cognitive disequilibrium - that common childhood sense of being confronted by something that doesn't seem to make sense given our normal understanding of the world, and needing to adjust. It's sorting out that Santa isn't real and being suddenly motivated to figure out who brought all the presents (and why your parents have been lying to you). Later in life, it's also losing a parent and really grappling with the fact that you and everyone you love will eventually die, and suddenly needing to learn how to keep going anyway.

Psychologists also talk about a similar concept - ,cognitive dissonance. This is the feeling you get when you realize that you hold beliefs that are inconsistent, or that your behaviors don't line up with your values. It's frequently created by the introduction of new information. It's the feeling triggered, for instance, by the notion that the affordable price of the device that you're staring at right now is made possible because workers are being exploited in factories overseas. It's the feeling of hopping in your car for a pleasant drive and listening to a radio show about how fossil fuels are a dwindling resource upon which the entirety of human society is dependent.

Significant moments of discomfort are the times when adults grow. Rewiring your brain might happen easily when you're a kid, but as an adult it's really hard work. It typically only happens when some event causes serious disruption to our former ways of thinking or behaving.

The idea with travel - and specifically with the GAP Month concept - is that you can (and should) cause disruption intentionally in order to put yourself in a situation where personal growth is possible.

What's the relationship between travel and personal growth?

What we're talking about with a GAP Month is an extended period of time where you choose voluntarily to immerse yourself in a very different situation from your normal. It means creating significant physical separation from home - you might fly to a different country, or you might just go somewhere local that you normally don't. You may walk into the woods if you live in the city, or you might spend a month wandering urban neighborhoods if you live in the country.

However far from home you stray physically, in a GAP Month you also cause a significant amount of disruption by taking an extended amount of time away from your normal pursuits to work towards some other goal: hiking across Colorado, or biking the Carretera Austral, or walking a circuit between every Buddhist Temple in Toronto.

The idea is, you're disrupting your life intentionally so you'll be confronted by new information and new challenges that will force you into a mindset that will allow you to grow and change.

This sort of interruption is a good idea in two main situations:

1) If things are stagnant, or

2) If your life has already been disrupted and you need to figure out how to get back to equilibrium.

1. GAP travel can be a controlled burn of intentional disruption

There's a guy named Jedediah Jenkins. I'm not sure how to describe him. He's definitely a writer. He's definitely a social media influencer. He's one of those people that hangs around with celebrities in LA but isn't exactly a celebrity himself. In any case though, he wrote a book about riding his bike from Oregon to Patagonia. The book is worth a read, and it's a lovely reflection on exactly the type of trip I'm talking about here. The title's what I wanted to highlight here. He named his story:

To Shake the Sleeping Self.

That's one of the things I'm trying to get at here with the GAP idea.

If life feels stagnant, or off, or dishonest, or meaningless, or even out of control, then time and distance from home (literal or figurative) can come as a healthy slap in the face. Or a healthy vigorous shake.

Doing something unusual for a month or two will put your brain into a situation where learning and creativity are facilitated.

A motorcycle trip in Mexico or a canoe trip down the Yukon require entirely different skills than a 9-5 accounting job. Emails from HR trigger a certain type of stress, but they'll never require you to figure out how to avoid pissing off a moose.

You're bound to develop some new skills, but unfamiliarity is also sure to shape your values in new ways, and will give you a different angle from which to consider the question of what matters in life.

It's likely that, without even trying, you'll encounter people living lives dramatically different from your own, modeling possibilities that you haven’t considered. This is one of the key ways that stagnant humans identify ways to improve their situations - learning from others who are doing it better.

Time and distance also provide you with perspective that you can't get at home.

Have you ever noticed that it's easier to solve your friends' problems than your own, or conversely, that you can see patterns of behavior that are causing your friends distress much more easily than they can? Some of that might just be self-righteousness, but it's still true that outside perspectives are innately valuable because emotional distance allows for objectivity.

A magical feature of travel is that time and distance give you the ability to view your own life from an outsider's perspective.

When you step off of a plane in Taiwan or walk into the woods in a new state, it triggers a sense of distance from your old life that's hard to quantify or replicate any other way. When you travel, it makes the foreign and distant seem immediate, which in turn makes your normal life feel foreign and distant.

This happens straightaway, and even a weekend trip can be valuable, but the longer you're away, the more profound this sense becomes. For me it usually takes about two weeks, but in time you start to feel like your old life isn’t the real you anymore. You start to look back on it with a sense of emotional distance, and a sense (based on the lived recent experience you gain in the GAP) that different ways of being are possible. The conditions are created that allow you to see and solve your own problems objectively, and approach life from a different angle when you return.

Maybe crappy employers and problematic partners are smart to try to prevent you from taking these sorts of trips, because these types of experiences are a risk to them. You might recognize that they're the root of the problems that you need to solve. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll recognize your own problematic patterns, having taken a period of time to live differently.

When you’re stagnant, or have a vague but unidentified sense of malaise, a month in an unusual context is a sure avenue towards new insight even if you don’t know what insight you’re looking for. It's a shock to the system, or a shake to the sleeping self.

2. GAP travel can also be the right intervention to process disruptions that have already occurred.

If you decide to hike the Appalachian Trail, or walk the Camino, or backpack around Southeast Asia, you will meet people going through divorce, or coping with death, or dealing with being fired from a job they loved. I guarantee it.

Why will they be there? Because they've heard somewhere, or recognized intuitively, that those types of experiences provide the right context for processing major life disruptions.

For a similar set of reasons that carving out a GAP Month in your life is a good way to facilitate intentional disruption and growth, it is also an ideal context for processing a disruption that's already occurred.

An unfortunate fact of life is that all of us will be forced repeatedly to deal with disruptions. Some disruptions are no big deal, but some are really terrible. Some are genuinely traumatic. Partners cheat. Children die suddenly. Chronic illnesses develop. Role models are exposed as frauds.

Life can be really shitty.

When disruptions happen, you have to figure out how to cope. It's both easy and common, particularly in really bad situations, to retreat into coping strategies that are unhealthy: social isolation, drugs, alcohol, affairs, or even suicide.

All of those are classic maladaptive coping skills focused on achieving distance, escape and avoidance.

Time away on an intentional, focused trip is an intervention that follows the same impulse towards escape, but channels it in a healthy, productive direction. Sometimes life throws enough crap at you that you can’t cope and really do need to get away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that. It happens to the best of us. It’s important to recognize though that there are healthy forms of escape, and unhealthy ones. A gap in life to re-establish your footing is always an option, and is healthier than a lot of the alternatives.

I didn't come up with this idea myself. If To Shake the Sleeping Self is a testimonial about the value of GAP for combating stagnation, Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Carrot Quinn's The Sunset Route are illustrations of its value for combatting chaos. In both books, protagonists use wandering and adventure to sort through messy lives, and come away with new directions and perspective. Death. Abuse. Mental illness. Poverty. When life screws you up, time and distance are a useful prescription to help you sort out your shit.

Regardless of why your cognitive dissonance arose, the benefits of time and distance are the same. They put you in a mindset where problems can be solved and new strategies can be identified, and they expose you to people you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, helping you identify life strategies that you wouldn't have come up with on your own. They give you the ability to put boundaries between yourself and your problems, and to look back on them more objectively.

If life has you emotionally dysregulated, a GAP also removes you from the offending situation. Running off into the wilderness, whether literally or figuratively, gets you into a neutral space where you can more easily shift out of fight, flight or freeze mode. Time and distance can give you the space to come up with a strategy to tackle your problems even if you have to go back to them eventually. Or, it can show you that you can literally leave your problems behind physically if you need to.

Sometimes you feel like you can't cope, and you have to get away. I say do it. A GAP month is a time-honored way to regain your equilibrium.

Do I really need to travel for a whole month?

I'll be honest. The idea for a GAP Month initially arose anecdotally. Angel (my wife) and I have taken multiple life-changing trips that were all about a month long - backpacking around Australia, the Camino de Santiago, a cycle tour around Taiwan, a month bussing around central Mexico. We had a saying when reflecting on our own experience - "Take a month off to travel, and it'll change your life." That's where this started.

To our credit though, we had back up on with this idea. Jesus wandered in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights when he needed a pilgrimage. El Camino de Santiago takes about a month on its most traditional route, and it's the most popular long walk in the world. The 88 Temples pilgrimage in Shikoku takes between 30 and 60 days to walk. I’m not sure that there’s anything magical about a month specifically, but the ancients testify that it seems to work.

Whatever the ancients say, a month is also a modern sweet spot that is significant and effective, but also specific, attainable, and realistic for most people. You can probably get the time off work if you plan ahead. You can also probably save enough money to make a month happen. You can explain a month to your family, and you can leave for a month without losing friendships or completely forgetting who you were before you left.

Also, from a psychological perspective, a month is almost definitely long enough to get started on major life changes. Everyone argues about this, but a developing consensus seems to be that it takes about two months to fully ingrain a new habit into your life. We're not necessarily talking about picking up new habits here, but the point is that a focused month is a good start towards making some real changes in life.

Longer trips are great, like six month thru-hikes or round the world gap year trips. They can make for more significant disruptions when you really need a dramatic change. But that can be hard to pull off. Life doesn't often allow for an easy year away. Shorter trips can also be impactful. Some of the world's great pilgrimages, like the Dajia Mazu pilgrimage in Taiwan, take only a week or two. But speaking anecdotally, shorter periods are less reliable. They don't always give you the sense of separation that comes from a month away.

Does it need to be a month exactly? Honestly? No, probably not. If you can't take a month, apply GAP month principles to a shorter trip and it'll still be really impactful. If you go for longer than a month, the impact on your life might be even greater.

But a month is a reliably significant disruption. A month will probably work. It's not science, exactly, but it has grounding in history, psychology and personal experience.

So, in conclusion, give yourself the time and distance to allow for change.

When we’re talking about a month away in the GAP concept, what we’re really talking about is creating the space in your life for growth. We’re talking about creating disruption intentionally in your day to day life to shake yourself out of a stagnant state. We're also talking about using travel as an intervention when something disruptive has already happened, to put yourself into a situation where you can process it healthily.

It’s a quick avenue towards change, really - throw yourself into a foreign environment and force yourself to survive for a month. You’d think it’d be destabilizing and stressful. It is, and that’s the point.

However, it can also be an escape hatch from life. It’s a chance to briefly transport yourself to a different world so you can look back on the one you came from with a different perspective. It can give you the necessary distance to decide what you’re going to do with the shit that life has thrown at you.

A month away - it’s what I personally prescribe at a minimum. What you're aiming for is therapeutic disruption: travel as a significant intervention.

Back to the GAP month introduction, in case you missed it.