edoardo's blog

I begin today to write about something – a project, I would call it – that I have been thinking about, with ups and downs, since 2015. Nine years ago, however, this project was just a dream, one of those wishes that in our minds always begin with “how I wish I could do X.” The verb “could” indicates many things here: enough money, time, independence, energy. A dream, however, as well as many of ours “New Year’s resolutions,” does not go very far on its own; it is confined to another dimension from which it is not always easy to find a path that brings successfully to reality.

The dream became a concrete project only in September 2022, precisely 1 year 4 months 9 days ago. I was at one of my dearest friends’ wedding and, during the best man’s speech, I announced publicly and for the first time what I had planned to do in 2024. The action was simple: walking. The where quite irrelevant to many: on the American West Coast. The duration and length were daunting, to say the least: about six months and just over four thousand kilometers.

I began to dream of walking even a part of this American trail before it became so famous thanks to the movie inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s book. How did I find out about it? Perhaps one of the most trivial way: Wikipedia. And since that day in 2015, it has never left my mind. It has been able to wait patiently for the right time to come. But does the right time really come? Partly yes, but not completely. It doesn’t just happen magically, I believe.

I don’t want to write now about what convinced me that it was time to turn that dream into what will make sense of much of my 2024. It is by far the most ambitious commitment I have ever decided to invest time and other resources in.

With this post I want to tell everything¹ about this adventure of mine. And I would like to do it in two parts: before departure and during the trip. It goes without saying that I want to reap as much as I can from this experience, something I may never be able to repeat. I will do my best to keep a photo-audio journal, perhaps with some brief textual accounts (and I have been thinking about the whole technical part for months now). But what comes first, that is, the time between now and early April², is equally important, and I would like to devote a series of posts to it.

In the spirit of a learning in public experiment, I’m planning to write about:

• The when (and why you need to study things thoroughly),
• the equipment, a potentially endless chapter,
• the logistics,
• and finally: the motivations.

In the first post of this pre-series, I will talk about when and why it is easier (but also more complicated) than expected.

-83 days to my PCT start.