Hi everyone, I’ve been writing this from the train on the way back to New York, and also from my home in New York. It was a little funny to look out the window and see all the towns and cities pass by, in some sense undoing all the progress I made over the last month. Of course, this is the wrong way to think about the train ride!
I intended to finish this post on the train, but it got longer than I expected. Then it got even longer. But I’ve finally finished, so here it is.
This post will have four parts. First, I’ll report on some highlights from my stay in Boston. Then I’ll recall some highlights from the walk itself. After that, I’ll reflect on the logistics and the process of doing the walk, and this will be by far the longest part of the post. Finally, I’ll say a few words about the celebratory dinner yesterday and make some final remarks. This last part was originally intended to be its own post after this one, but since I didn’t finish this one in time, I decided to combine both of them. So let’s start.
Highlights of Boston:I have already reported on my first day spent in Boston, the 4th of July. So this section is about the 5th until now.
On July 5th:
I got lunch at a favorite restaurant of mine in the BU area, Sunset Cantina. When I was a counselor at PROMYS (see my July 4th post) I would, from time to time, come here with other counselors and we’d hang out, eat, and drink (if we were old enough). They have a fairly wide beer selection. I started with a Golden Monkey by Victory.
This is a tripel, which, as many of you know, is my favorite kind of beer. This one’s brewed in the states, making it widely available, so it’s not uncommon that I’ll have this particular beer. Next:
I actually got these nachos as my meal (they’re quite big, after all). The other PROMYS counselors and I would very often get these nachos when we came here. They’re really, really good. I got pulled pork on these ones. Oh yes, and no tomatoes!
The late Amelia Perry would often order no tomatoes on the nachos. This is somehow one fond memory I have of her, since her accent would make it sound to me like she was saying “tomartoes.” Amelia, this one’s for you!
The above beer, by the way, was a Weihenstephaner Hefeweiss. Also pretty good!
On July 6th:
I felt like having a dessert in the middle of the day.
These are mochi ice creams from Japonaise Bakery. The one on the left is chocolate espresso flavored, and the one on the right is salted caramel flavored. Since these were quite small, I also got mango and sticky rice from Giggling Rice, a Thai restaurant.
On July 7th:
As remarked in my first post on this blog, I wanted to deliver a lecture to the counselors at PROMYS when I made it to Boston. This was the day it was scheduled.
Actually, I was supposed to give two lectures, one on the 7th and one on the 9th. So I just gave the first one this day. The second was supposed to be a continuation of the first, and together they were supposed to provide an introduction to the Iwasawa theory of cyclotomic fields. I assumed almost no background on algebraic number theory, so I was only able to really expose the structure of the theory on a broad level: On the algebraic side there are these arithmetically constructed modules over the Iwasawa algebra which tend to be finitely generated torsion and have control theorems, and on the analytic side, there are these elements of the Iwasawa algebra which are related to classical L-functions, and they are also related to the aforementioned modules by a “Main Conjecture.” I explained all of this precisely in the case of the cyclotomic tower. I couldn’t provide many proofs because it’s difficult to get started doing that without any class field theory.
I actually ended up giving three lectures; the one on the 9th split into two in order to stop it from being rushed, and this second (or third in total) lecture was scheduled for the 10th.
On July 8th:
I visited the Museum of Science in Cambridge. My parents often took me here when we lived in Wellesley. Here are some nice highlights of my visit.
This is at the end of the history wall in the mathematics exhibit. John Tate is missing! Another excerpt from that wall:
Indeed, the 1850’s were an extremely productive decade for mathematics.
I also saw the electricity show. This consisted of a presentation (by quite an amusing person) on the science of electricity and magnetism, with lots of big machines and bright (and loud!) lightning. This guy used giant Tesla coils and a huge Van de Graaff generator to put on a show. The Van de Graaff generator was the original one constructed in 1929 for MIT. I should maybe have gotten pictures of the show, but I didn’t want to disturb the other people in the audience by pulling out my phone.
Two more pictures:
This is a video phone from the 1960’s. Facetime from half a century ago.
This is the pendulum, which I totally remember from when I was a kid. The Earth’s rotation causes it to change direction slightly with each swing, and it knocks over a pin on the ground every half an hour (I think).
Afterwards, my host and good family friend, Howard, and I went to dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant, Mary Chung. My family used to go there quite often when we lived in Wellesley.
On July 9th:
Before giving my lecture this day, I stopped by Glenn Stevens’s office to ask a question (and to ask for some of his Hagoromo chalk). I asked about these archimedean L-factors I mentioned during my stay in New Haven. I had so little time to do math on the walk that I still had not done this computation correctly. He pointed me in the direction of David Rohrlich, another Boston University professor, and Rohrlich was eventually able to walk me through the process of obtaining the correct answer! I still need to check everything carefully, but at least I know how to do that now, and how to do the same thing for more general situations too.
Then I gave my second lecture, and…
On July 10th:
I gave my third.
On July 11th:
I got on a train, and went home. Funny remark: when the guy asked me for my ticket, he asked where I was headed, and I said “Boston,” twice! I was so used to giving that answer. After all, I was headed there for 24 days.
Now I want to mention some highlights from the walk itself. A lot of you will remember these from earlier in the blog.
On the 5th day of the walk, In Westport, Connecticut, I was walking back to my Airbnb from dinner. On the way, I spotted a little girl holding up a sign by the side of the road. I wondered if she was going to sell me lemonade or something, but as I got closer, it turned out her sign said “Free Advice.” This was great, so I told her I was walking to Boston and asked her for some advice. She gave me two excellent pieces of advice: First, buy lots of food and water, and second, if I see any really mean pets, just panic and run!
That’s her dad in the background of the picture, making sure nothing goes wrong.
On the 11th day of the walk, in Plainville, Connecticut, I got an espresso at a coffee shop called Rebel Dog.
This was the best one I had on the trip. The second best was on the 8th (and also 9th) day in New Haven, at the Coffee Pedaler, and the third best was at Tatte Bakery, in Cambridge, just before reaching Boston.
On the 14th day of the walk, which was a rest day, I was staying with Miriam and her husband Michael in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Miriam is the sister of Howard who, as I mentioned, I stayed with during my time in Boston. Her family and I had an excellent dinner at Max Burger in Longmeadow. This was probably my favorite experience on the trip.
On the 16th day, I stayed with my old Nanny, Pia, in Brimfield, Massachusetts. I hadn’t had seen her since moving away from Wellesley. I had a great time catching up and also eating shepherd’s pie!
On the 21st day of the walk, before hitting Wellesley, I stopped by my old elementary school in South Natick, and saw the old buildings, and the new. The old buildings were so much smaller than I remembered! My kindergarten teacher, Lynn, very generously gave me a tour.
Now I want to take some time to reflect on the walk and describe the process of doing the walk. I’ll give many topics and discuss each of them. A lot of this might be reiterated from previous posts, but I think it’s good to have it all in one place.
The purpose of the walk:
The main question I was asked when I told people I was walking from New York City to Boston was “Why?”
The answer to this question starts with an attempt of mine to lose a lot of weight, beginning July 15 of last year. The reason I wanted to lose weight was medical: I had become prediabetic. So it was clear I needed to make some serious lifestyle changes.
The biggest change I made was to my diet, but I also had this goal of walking 40 miles a week, which I did. Eventually, I just got more and more into it. 40 became 70 became 80, and I enjoyed my strolls around New York more and more.
Then one day in February, while walking in the park, I thought “What if I actually went somewhere when I did this? Why not Boston?” The plan associated with this thought eventually fell into place, and on June 11, off I went.
Practice walks:
Well, the planning didn’t go quite that quickly. I had to figure out where I would stay, how I would stay there, what I would bring, and even if this was doable. To address this last point, I decided to take two practice walks, one on May 23, and one on May 24.
I packed the backpack I had planned to bring on the walk full with everything I had planned to bring in it, and walked about 16 miles each of these two days around New York City.
The thing that concerned me the most after the first day was shoulder and neck strain from the backpack. But it got just a little better after the second practice walk, so I was somewhat more confident, though still not completely confident.
I also practiced finding restaurants on these practice walks, and even the skill of recording everything for this blog, which brings me to
Blogging:
There really is some skill in being able to write down, and take pictures of, the important things that happen along each walk for this blog. This blog had a format. I’d list places I went with pictures, departure and arrival times, the day’s weather, exercise stats from the walk, the first album I listened to that day, and the record of the day’s walk. On a typical walking day, as I departed, I would start a note in my phone’s notes app with some of this information, like the departure time. I would also look ahead on the map that was guiding me to my destination for towns, and I would often write down the names of the towns so I would know when to take pictures of them.
There were standard things to take note of, or pictures of, on each day’s walk, like meals. Eventually, with some practice, I got the hang of creating each blog entry’s outline as I walked.
The purpose of the blog:
I really wanted to have a detailed record of this walk. I knew I would come back to it later, and I wanted other people to be able to know what was going on, especially friends and family. The idea was to keep everything accurate and provide good information about the walk. There was one post where I contrasted this with the idea of embellishing the blog with, for instance, pictures that did not reflect accurately what I was experiencing, and how I sacrificed flare for accuracy. This is the idea, and hopefully I’ve done a decent job of this.
Music:
One feature of this blog, as mentioned above, was a description of the first album I listened to every day. I wanted to make all of these different, and find interesting choices in my collection that I would enjoy listening to, and I think I succeeded.
More generally, music was an extremely important part of this walk, and is an extremely important part of walking for me in general. I almost always listen to music when I walk. Although I’m a huge fan of death metal and black metal, which can be quite dark at times, I seem to be well able to twist this darkness into pleasure; the music never brings me down, just up.
Backpack:
I used a hiking backpack I bought on Amazon to transport everything I needed during my walk. My backpack had a lot of stuff in it, and I’ll list the items later on below. But now I want to talk more about the experience of carrying it.
As I mentioned above, shoulder and neck strain was a real concern after the practice walks. This eventually stopped being so, however, as my shoulders toughened up. But this wasn’t the only physical problem I experienced with my backpack. Eventually, some time during the second half of the walk, I ended up getting a rash on my back. I had some zinc oxide with me to help with things like this, however, and the rash eventually went away.
But the reason I think I got this rash was that the shoulder straps on my backpack would very quickly become loose. I’d have to tighten them every 45 minutes or so. But sometimes I’d forget, and before I tightened the straps, the backpack would sort of hang off my shoulders into my back, and it would rub. I also only realized just how much I should tighten the straps near the end of the walk.
So, in retrospect, I should have looked out for this problem of straps loosening on their own and bought a different backpack.
Resilience of shoulders and feet:
It was apparent maybe after the second rest day that shoulder strain was not going to be an issue at all during the walk. In fact, in the beginning I would have to rest my shoulders every hour, but by the time I was half way to Boston, I could complete a four hour walk without taking backpack off. Although, my feet would be a little achy if I did that, but it was tolerable.
My feet did blister a little during the first few days, but then the blisters went away and soreness became more of a concern than blisters, even though soreness was hardly a concern in the first place.
Actually, my left foot did blister one more time on the walk, on day 23, which was the “rest” day in Wellesley. I was very surprised by this. Speaking of which…
Rest days:
After my practice walks, I decided to add in days on the walk where I stayed overnight in the same place twice, when I was concerned about shoulder and neck strain. On rest days I didn’t have to wear my backpack and could explore whatever area I was in. Eventually, rest days became more for psychological rest rather than physical rest, and they became further apart. I had four such days, on the 4th, 8th, 14th, and 23rd days of the walk. Though there was the 17th day of the walk where the trip only took two hours or so. This was kind of like a half rest day.
Time:
Time played many important roles during the 24 days of the walk, as it tends to do in life. For instance, I always tried to make the amount of time I spent walking between destinations around 4 or 5 hours. If we add on rests and meals, this would usually push it the time spent traveling up between 6 and 8 hours. This time decreased a little near the end of the 24 days, when my body was resilient enough to walk about two and a half hours without taking a break or getting sore. Stops became more and more infrequent towards the end because of this.
Actually, near the beginning of the walk I had days where I walked for over six hours total. But after doing that twice (once on day 3 and again on day 6) I decided to make an effort to keep my total walking time under five and a half, or preferably just five, hours. Otherwise I’d get a little too sore and tired of walking by the end.
I also spent time walking to dinner after arriving at my destination, and a lot of time calling my parents. We would often have long phone conversations. I also spent quite a bit of time sleeping. I needed a lot of extra sleep during the walk because I was wearing myself out. Usually I got between nine and eleven hours of sleep per night. All of this, along with writing each blog post every day, left me very little time to do things like math.
I did do a tiny bit of math in various places along the way, most notably on my rest day in New Haven, but not nearly as much as I intended. I maybe could have done more math during each day’s walk, but I was more focused on creating each blog post’s outline, where I was going, the conditions of the road, etc., and I was not able to focus too hard on math while I was walking. This walk really turned out to be more time consuming than I originally expected.
Psychology:
Naturally, since I was focusing so much on the journey, I did get mentally tired out from time to time. But usually I was okay, and when the walk was nice, I really enjoyed it.
My mental point of view of the walk definitely evolved over time. The very first day I was certainly nervous, even a little anxious. I didn’t know what was ahead. I was walking from my home in New York City to an Airbnb in the Bronx. I was straying from the path provided by Google Maps a bit (something which I ended up doing very rarely on later walking days) and, of course, some of the Bronx is not too nice. To top it off, my Airbnb was right next to the above-ground subway station where the 2 train ends, and this created a lot of noise when I was trying to sleep. So I started the second day without sufficiently good rest.
On the second day I was definitely still nervous. I went from the Bronx into Yonkers, which was definitely nicer, but still not too pristine. However, as soon as I made it out of Yonkers into Bronxville, where the scenery suddenly changed to fancy old architecture against lots of greenery, I knew that this walk was going to be good. I felt much better, and this lasted for many days.
There were times during the first few days of the walk where I thought to myself “I can’t believe I’m doing this, this is awesome!” These thoughts eventually changed to just “Hmm… This is really nice!” as I got used to the idea of walking from New York City to Boston. I also remember on the 5th day of the walk, in Westport, after meeting the little girl with the “Free Advice” sign, I definitely fell asleep with a big smile on my face; I was really enjoying myself and the idea of what I was doing.
I also think the walk lasted the right amount of time. By the end, I definitely felt that if I continued for much longer, things would start to get old and a little monotonous, as well as tiring. So I’m glad I chose the length that I did.
There were a couple times along the walk where I was nervous about my surroundings, most notably in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I passed through some really run-down areas. This sort of stopped happening after New Haven though, and eventually I was less nervous about what would be ahead of me on my walks.
On a similar note, the worst day of the walk was definitely day 18, from Sturbridge to Auburn. It was raining hard, and the roads had almost no space for me to walk. On top of that, I would often hit stretches where there were guardrails that limited my space even more. So I would have to wait for traffic to pass, run up the road until more cars came and then lean back against the guardrail, and then shield myself from water splashed by the passing cars with my umbrella. The walk was like this for about four hours until I hit the town of Auburn, where there was suddenly sidewalk. I had never been so grateful for a sidewalk in my life.
Weather:
Luckily (in fact, extremely luckily) this day walking to Auburn was the only day with bad rain. There were two other days with rain, day 3 and day 13, but it wasn’t nearly as bad.
On the walk, I chose to take an umbrella, which was fairly big, but it fit in my backpack. I did this instead of a poncho or anything like that. I don’t mind holding an umbrella, and I would expect an umbrella to interact less with headphone wires than a poncho. My backpack also came with a protective rain cover. This meant I could hold my umbrella a little more forward in the rain, which helped keep my feet drier.
In contrast, at the end of the walk, I ended up in a Massachusetts heat wave. When I arrived in Arlington on day 23 I was as soaked with sweat as I was with rain walking to Auburn! Luckily I had sunscreen, which I used every day except days 1, 2, 3, and 18. (I didn’t put it on during the first day because I’ve never gotten sunburned in the city, and I forgot to do it the second day and got very close to getting sunburned. Days 3 and 18 were rainy, so I didn’t bother.)
Airbnb:
My primary means of finding places to stay at night was the Airbnb app. This turned out to work quite well very often, and when it did not, I was always able to book a hotel room instead. Of the first 22 nights, I stayed in a hotel 3 nights, the house of someone I knew 5 nights, and an Airbnb the remaining 14 nights. During the night of the 23rd day and onwards, I was at Howard’s.
It was sometimes not possible to find an Airbnb or a hotel directly on the intended path of my walk, but there was always one of these close enough to the path, maybe a town or two over. In a few of my posts, I gave tentative lists of places where I planned to stay, and it was this which caused those lists to change so much; whenever I had to stay in a different town than originally planned, the next reasonable destination would also change, and so on. But this was no big deal.
Now, booking Airbnbs also came with a skill set. My method was this: I would look for cheap and well-rated Airbnbs in the area where I wanted to stay two or three days ahead. I would consider a few places (if there were a few; sometimes there were none) and request to book my top choice out of those considered. If my request was not approved within a reasonable amount of time, I would contact my second choice (make an “inquiry” in the app) and ask them if they could take me if I didn’t hear back from my first choice. I had to do this a couple of times, and actually, I always went with the second choice when I did this. I never had to go with my third choice. I also, by the way, never ruled out an Airbnb because of a bad rating. I did end up giving all my hosts five stars. There were no Airbnbs that I was dissatisfied with, except maybe the first one, just because of the trains passing by (which I did mention in my review). So I generally had a very good experience using Airbnb.
Maps:
So how did I decide what path I would take between each Airbnb/house/hotel? Well, I relied heavily on Google Maps. It was able to provide me walking instructions between each destination. I actually never used Apple Maps on my iPhone, since I’ve had plenty of experience comparing the two, and Google Maps was almost always better.
Google Maps also let me organize my pins really well. For those who don’t know, I did this thing as I was walking where, whenever I took a rest, or whenever stopped somewhere for a meal or something else, or sometimes just when the road turned, I would place a pin in Google Maps at my location and then save the coordinates locally on my phone. This way I could see the shape of my path on the map.
I usually followed the path laid out for me by Google Maps. There were some days where I diverted myself from the path to change the scenery, most notably the first day, when I went through parks. But every once in a while Google Maps would take me somewhere I didn’t really want to be. For instance, sometimes the road would be unreasonable for pedestrians. Whenever this happened, I would usually look for an alternate route and sacrifice a little time. The only time this didn’t work was on the trip from Sturbridge to Auburn that I keep mentioning.
Roads:
Google Maps never took me on an interstate, however, and even if it did, I wouldn’t have followed it. One question I very often get is if I ever walked on highways, and the answer that I did not do interstates, like I just said, but I did do state and US routes. These were usually fine, either with sidewalks or enough space for me to walk on the side (again, the main exception being the infamous Sturbridge to Auburn walk).
I always walked opposing traffic when there was no sidewalk, and tried my best to avoid roads with a high speed limit or lots of traffic.
Eating:
Since I was on the road, I mostly ate at restaurants. There were a couple of times where I bought some groceries, like fruit and yogurt, and would eat that for a meal, but mostly I ate at restaurants. To find restaurants, I mainly used the Yelp app, whose relatively new map view was extremely helpful since I was on foot.
Breakfasts for me were much bigger than usual on this trip. I usually tried to eat a lot of protein to sustain myself through the walk. Lunch usually came near the end of each day’s walk, or at least after more than half of each day’s walk. Again, Yelp’s map view was helpful, because I could move the map to the area I was going to be in when I felt like I would be hungry, and use the “redo search in this area” function.
I ate much more on this trip than I usually do, naturally, since I was burning so many calories. However, I ate many fewer snacks altogether. That is, outside of breakfast, lunch or dinner, I ate very little. This was surprising to me, since I do not like getting hungry. It may have been because of the size of my meals that I did not need many snacks, though.
Coffee:
Yelp was also used frequently to find coffee. I’m a really big fan of good espresso, and I take a double shot every morning. For me, the ideal espresso shot is very strong and fairly sweet, but in a chocolatey and somewhat roasty way. I found many espresso shots along the way that were strong and sweet, but only one that was really also chocolatey. This was at Rebel Dog in Plainville, Connecticut.
I also found many shots that did not meet any of these criteria. I still drank them in order to wake myself up a little, but some of them were just not worth the extra jolt, especially on a day where I was well rested.
I’ve received many comments about how people enjoyed, or were amused by my criticism of coffee on this blog, and I’m pretty serious about my coffee. One policy I made, however, was to never say anything negative about the coffee provided to me by my hosts. The act of providing me coffee is too generous to warrant any criticism, and was always much appreciated no matter what.
Just in case anyone’s curious, the coffee I make at home is brewed in a very specific way, using beans whose flavor matches my description of ideal coffee above. I use an Aeropress to make my espresso, actually. I hand grind about three and a half scoops (measured with the Aeropress scooper) of beans in a Lido 3 grinder, heat up a large mug, and pour a small cup of boiling water over the grinds in the Aeropress chamber. I actually eyeball all of the amounts of water and coffee, and I use only enough water to make the “sludge” in the Aeropress chamber easily movable with the paddle. Then I press like a maniac, striking the top of the Aeropress stopper to knock coffee off the bottom of the whole apparatus. This method makes the espresso more roasty and chocolatey and less acidic tasting than using an actual espresso machine. The only downside is that there is no crema, but I’m okay with this. Perhaps another downside is the amount of time it takes, but I enjoy the whole process; it constitutes my morning ritual.
Body weight:
Now, one concern about eating out so much on the trip was weight gain. I seem to tend to gain weight pretty easily if I’m not careful, and maintaining my weight is extremely important to me right now since I recently lost a lot of it. I could usually tell just by looking in the mirror how well I was doing, or at least I think I could.
So, what was the total change in my weight on the trip? It was a gain of two and a half pounds. It isn’t clear how much of this was fat and how much was muscle, but just judging by my image in the mirror and how well my clothes fit, I think it was about half and half. This is maybe not bad, since I was pretty concerned about getting out of control and going overboard with my eating before I left. After losing a total of 100 pounds between mid-July of 2017 and mid-April of 2018, I ended up gaining 20 back, and most of this was due to being out of control at special occasions, like vacations and special dinners. So I was worried that this was going to be a similar story, but I’m glad it wasn’t. Hopefully I’ve stabilized by this point, but I can’t let my guard down yet.
Sleep:
On another health-related note, my sleep during the trip was excellent in general. Since I was tiring myself out so much, I would usually get between nine and eleven hours of sleep per night. Most of the beds I slept in were very comfortable.
I usually went to bed around 8:00, which was before it got dark, and I usually got up around 6:00, and almost always before my alarm went off.
Transportation:
During the entire journey to Boston, I (very stubbornly) never used any other mode of transportation besides walking. I was willing to use other modes of transportation in case of emergency, but luckily I never had to. The only thing maybe I used was a couple of elevators, but I think that’s okay!
Once I reached Boston, however, I was perfectly willing to use cars and public transportation. In fact, after the Fourth of July fireworks display in Boston, I took the subway back into Cambridge and (after the bus didn’t arrive) a Lyft from there to where I was staying.
Data:
It was extremely important for me to be able to download data to my phone both while on the road and not. I needed to make heavy use of Google Maps, as well as Airbnb and Yelp, for instance. Google Maps allows you to download offline maps beforehand, which I did in case of dead zones, but you cannot get walking directions offline. This was never a serious problem, though.
Also important was the presence of wifi in the places I was staying. Actually, I tried to connect to wifi whenever possible in order to avoid using up my cellular data on my mobile plan. I did end up needing an extra gigabyte of data on my mobile plan during the walk, but my parents gladly purchased it for me (yes, I am still on my parents’ mobile plan) which was greatly appreciated.
There were two Airbnbs whose wifi was not working at the time of my stay. The first one generously alerted me of this before accepting my request to book, and I told the host I should be able to get by on cellular. The second time I was the one to discover that the wifi wasn’t working; the router ended up needing a reboot, but the hosts were not around until the next day. I went to a coffee shop to get wifi that night.
Every once in a while, to use my iPad for blogging and whatnot while away from wifi sources, I would connect to my phone’s personal hotspot, though this was not ideal because of data usage.
Lastly, I want to discuss
What I had in my backpack:
Let me give a complete list. In my backpack, I had clothes, a bag of toiletries and medication, a bag of snacks, my iPad, my umbrella, a bag with various chargers, two external phone batteries, and spare headphones, sunscreen, my passport, my keys for my apartment, a pocket knife, tissues, and two water bottles. Altogether, the backpack weighed around 20 pounds.
Clothes:
I brought with me four short sleeved t-shirts, five pairs of underwear, seven pairs of socks, two pairs of jeans, one pair of shorts, and the outfit I was wearing on the day I left. Everyone who knows me knows that I wear a black t-shirt and blue jeans every day. Consequently, I never ended up wearing the shorts (although maybe I should have during the heat wave at the end).
The number of shirts I brought meant that I had to do laundry at most every four days (I wore each pair of jeans two days in a row). This was fine; laundry machines turned out to be accessible enough throughout my trip that I never needed to go to a laundromat. But if I had brought just one more shirt, I could could have pushed these intervals up to five days, which would have been slightly preferable.
Even though these were never in my backpack, I should talk about my
Shoes:
My current pair of shoes are the ones I wore on the walk, and they are a very durable brand of running shoes by New Balance. My last pair of these lasted me for over 2000 miles (yes, that number has four digits) before I felt they needed to be replaced. I replaced them about 10 days before the walk, actually, and put about 100 miles on the new ones to break them in beforehand. These shoes also never come untied somehow; I just slip them on and off.
Toiletries:
In my bag of toiletries I brought the following items: a toothbrush, a small container of toothpaste, dental floss, a stick of deodorant, a small container of shampoo, a hairbrush, about 40 days worth of my prescription medication, as well as pain pills, heartburn pills and allergy meds, zinc oxide (for rashes), a few medium and large Ziploc bags, Gold Bond powder (for use on my feet to avoid blisters), moleskin, bandages, Neosporin, and antibacterial wipes.
I never ended up using the Gold Bond, moleskin, bandages, Neosporin, antibacterial wipes, pain pills, heartburn pills, or allergy meds. I also avoided washing my hair too much to conserve the shampoo. I did end up using one of the extra large Ziploc bags, just as a barrier in my backpack that separated clean and dirty clothes, and a medium one to keep an external phone battery in, separately from my other electronics, for easy access on the road.
For my morning medication I have one of those pill cases with different slots for different days, and I would make up the case every week or so. My prescription meds were in separate small Ziploc bags, and so were the non-prescription meds, and all these small bags were folded in half and put in one medium bag.
I was lucky that I had enough prescription medication and did not have to refill on the road. My pharmacy let me fill one prescription a couple days early, on June 10, right before the trip.
The one thing I can think of which I should have brought and did not was bug spray. There was one day this would have really come in handy (day 17).
Electronics:
In a large Ziploc bag of electronics (bagged to avoid getting wet from rain) I had four chargers, one for my phone, one for my iPad, one for my Apple Watch, and a spare one for my phone, as well as two external phone batteries and their charging cords (though, as mentioned above, one of these batteries eventually had its own bag separate from this one), one adapter to plug either of those cords into an outlet, and a spare pair of headphones. I kept my phone and my other pair of headphones in my pocket, as well as my wallet, and wore my watch. My watch, by the way, is what I used to obtain my exercise stats. Maybe I’ll mention here, just because I mentioned my wallet, that I had about 200 dollars in cash with me to start the trip and did not come close to using it all. I was almost always able to use my credit card.
The external batteries turned out to be extremely useful. They were completely necessary to keep my phone alive and running Google Maps on most walking days. Often I would take out the one which was separated from the big bag during my rests and charge my phone, and sometimes I would continue to charge with it while I was walking. My jeans have a nice small extra pocket for holding the battery above the pocket I put my phone in. I also tried to charge my phone with an outlet at restaurants to avoid draining my external batteries, though this was not always possible.
It was essential to charge my phone and watch at night, especially since I use a noise machine app on my phone to sleep. So having two outlets in the rooms I stayed was necessary, but also sufficient; my iPad could last for days without charge, and I could recharge it and my external batteries before going to sleep.
Snacks:
My snack bag started off with a bunch of granola bars, some dried wild blueberries from Trader Joe’s (super good!), a small Ziploc bag of peanuts, a couple Nutrigrain bars, two apples, and two oranges. I ate the fruit within the first week, and slowly ate some of the bars and dried blueberries. I didn’t eat the peanuts and I had about seven granola bars left when I returned. I never refilled my snack bag on the trip, and I did not need to. In fact, I only ended up eating things from this bag in the places I stayed, never on the road. I never felt like I needed to stop and actually have a snack from my bag on the road. So I definitely could have brought fewer snacks. I shouldn’t have brought the fruit either, because it was kind of heavy, and was going to go bad if I had waited a little longer to eat it.
Water:
Finally, my water bottles were just two 20 ounce Gatorade bottles I happened to have in the house before I left. This generally was not nearly enough water for each walking day, but I was always able to buy more water or just refill these along the way.
I always tried to refrigerate my water bottles overnight, and the one time I didn’t have access to a refrigerator (in one of the hotels) I did have access to ice. So my water was always cold when I started my walks. I would usually try to drink from the water bottle that was getting hit by the sun first (the bottles were in side-pockets on opposite sides of my backpack) so that the other bottle would be cooler when I got around to drinking from it.
I did buy a fancy bottle for my trip, but I brought it on a hike beforehand and found that it had a tendency to fall out of the pockets on my backpack. It was just too big. But my Gatorade bottles fit quite nicely and almost never fell out.
That’s it for the logistics. I hope my readers found at least some of that interesting. But finally it’s time to bring this blog to a close with a few words about the dinner.
I invited my friends in the New York area to gather with me at Szechuan Garden, my favorite Chinese place in the area. We all had a good time, and the meal was excellent. I let my friend Pak-Hin discuss with everyone and then do the ordering. We all shared the dishes. I did request that we get the cumin beef (extra spicy) and thousand year eggs. But everything I tried was excellent, and the meal was extremely satisfying.
Picture taken by Lena.
Across from me was my friend Vince, from high school. He’s a pilot and he was up here for work. I was really glad he could make it. I had actually seen him the day I returned too, but before that, the last time we got to see each other was almost four years ago, even though we keep in touch just about every day.
One question which a lot of people asked me at dinner was whether I would ever do something like this again. The answer is: I’m really not sure. Not sure at all. It’s too early to say. I’m definitely not planning on it any time soon, but in the future, who knows? I guess we’ll wait and see.
Now as this blog and this journey both come to a close, I feel very happy and accomplished, but also just slightly sad at the same time. This could easily be the most interesting thing I’ll ever do, and I may never have an experience quite like this again. But I guess the right thing to do is take this as a challenge find something else to do in the future, something even more interesting, and more unique. What will it be? I can’t say now, but there’s no shortage of ideas out there.
Finally, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to all my readers and everyone who followed me from afar, everyone who hosted me, everyone who showed any interest in my journey, and anyone else who helped me out along the way. This wouldn’t have been the same, or even possible, without you all. Thank you!
Now, on to the next interesting thing!
LGA to BOS on Foot 