I wish that I could remember my first trip. No, not a trip to a different city, not even a trip to a different country (I can remember that trip to Canada), but my trip across the carpet to my Mom’s or Dad’s outstretched arms. A question though! Why did you or I leave the relative safety of the floor? Why did you or I leave the stability of crawling using our four appendages in order to wobble and totter precariously on only two legs? Why did you or I try to do this dozens and dozens of times, failing each time, until we finally managed those first steps? God only knows! Yet, we all had that desire to move, to get to that someone or something, on the other side of the carpet. Maybe as a child, I always wanted to get to that other side of the carpet, and beyond. What did Wordsworth write? “The child is the father of the man!”

I hesitate to say why I’m walking the Via Francigena. The simplest explanation is the peculiarity of my history. Traveling is in my DNA. Probably at least once a month, our parents would make sure that Chuck, my brother, and I were in the backseat as we traveled to Lowder, a village twenty miles from Springfield, Illinois. The purpose was to visit Grandma Jones. Chuck and I might have looked forward to picking grapes, to climbing the twenty-foot high sand pile, or to entering the mysterious Jones’ General Store (locked since our grandfather’s death). Or, when we got bored, we’d see how many flies we could catch off the hood or trunk of the car, then hurl them viciously against the car to see if they survived the impact. We definitely did not look forward to using the old outhouse. On another level, this insatiable desire to travel has stimulated traveling through Asia from Ladakh to Rameshwaram, from Dharmshala to Goa, from Kolkata to Mumbai in India, from Beijing to Lhasa, from Shangahi to Kashgar in China, from Thailand’s Chiang Mai , Myanmur’s Yangon and Bagan, to Jordan’s Amman and Petri, Israel’s Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Eilat, and many other places. My desire to walk the Via Francigena is connected to this DNA of wanting to see something more, something….different? While I may return to Asian traveling, I’m conscious that I’ve pivoted to slow-travel through Europe.

Out of all the ways to see, Europe, why the Via Francigena? I still hesitate in explaining. Despite the overly pious words, I’m intentionally walking one of the oldest Christian pilgrimage trails. While I’m walking the VF as a solitary pilgrim, if I do temporarily walk with companions, I would be surprised by their walking in hopes of a specific miracle or walking as some deeply penitential act. Others might walk for those reasons. Not my reasons. Thankfully, I haven’t had cancer or a heart attack; fortunately, I haven’t walked into one of my former classrooms with an AK-47 or had to kill a home invader, or even invaders to the USA like Ukrainians must do to defend themselves. Walking with the hope of a miracle or the desire to do penance are not my reasons. Instead, the explanations for my European desire must lie somewhere else. It might be that I want to see if I’ll meet any pilgrims like Chaucer’s famous pilgrims, the knight, the pardoner, the scholar, the parson, the friar or the nun. Maybe I’m walking to see if this 71-year old body can still move through miles of farmland and hills. Maybe I’m walking simply to be continually amazed at the world around us. Maybe I’m walking as a pilgrim to see how that very old, old language of being a pilgrim or making a pilgrimage, not treated satirically as Chaucer often does, has some real substance and truth today?