{"id":818,"date":"2026-10-31T14:05:50","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T14:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=818"},"modified":"2026-10-31T14:05:50","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T14:05:50","slug":"karl-bushby-28-years-36000-miles-walk-almost-home-hull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=818","title":{"rendered":"HE WALKED OUT THE DOOR IN 1998. HE\u2019S STILL NOT HOME, BUT HE\u2019S CLOSE! | Karl Bushby has hoofed 36,000 miles from the tip of Chile toward Hull without a single ride, and now he has to figure out who he is when the walking stops"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS ON FOOT! Former paratrooper <strong>Karl Bushby<\/strong> set off from <strong>Punta Arenas, Chile<\/strong>, in <strong>November 1998<\/strong>, aged 29, to walk an unbroken path home to <strong>Hull<\/strong> in England. Now 57, he is on his final few miles, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq8rz38jr50go\">BBC<\/a> reports.<\/p>\n<p>He set himself two rules and never broke them: no returning to the UK until the walk was done, and <strong>no transport to move forward<\/strong>. Along the way he hacked through the jungles of the <strong>Dari\u00e9n Gap<\/strong>, crossed the frozen <strong>Bering Strait<\/strong> (in 2006), and just weeks ago <strong>swam the English Channel<\/strong> to land near Dover. The total: about <strong>36,000 miles<\/strong> across four continents.<\/p>\n<p>Waiting at the finish: his 36-year-old son Adam, a <strong>12-year-old granddaughter he has never met<\/strong>, his father and brothers, and his mother, at the gate of the childhood home he left 28 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>It hasn\u2019t been glamorous. Bushby says he spent only about 15 of those years actually walking; the rest went to visas, \u201cdealing with geopolitics,\u201d and Covid delays, often waiting it out in Mexico where living was cheap. \u201cI\u2019m dealing with the day-to-day stuff &#8211; punctures, just trying to find a place where you can wash your underwear,\u201d he told the BBC. \u201cIt\u2019s not as glorious as it looks.\u201d Before sponsors and a book deal, he says he was a \u201cpenniless backpacker\u201d living on donations and even food discarded by the roadside.<\/p>\n<p>The scary part may be the finish line. \u201cEverything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away,\u201d he said. \u201cI will have to figure out who I am again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>His verdict on the planet after all those miles? \u201cI personally have met the very best of humanity\u2026 The kindness of strangers made it all come together. I couldn\u2019t have done it without the world.\u201d And his first fish, chips and mushy peas in almost three decades? Nobody does it like the Brits, he says.<\/p>\n<p><em>Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cq8rz38jr50go\">BBC News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Karl Bushby has hoofed 36,000 miles from the tip of Chile toward Hull without a single ride, and now he has to figure out who he is when the walking stops<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/bb-bushby-walk-1031.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}