A 61-year-old man on Friday concluded his month-long hike from the nation’s capital to New York City.
WCBS 880’s Mack Rosenberg spoke with Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, in the morning, shortly before he crossed into the Big Apple.
“I am sitting across the river in Jersey City and in a couple hours I'm gonna meet a fine fellow who's gonna take me across the river in a kayak,” King told Rosenberg, adding that he feels “good” after the long hike.
The 61-year-old set off from Washington, D.C. on March 29 by heading north towards York, Pennsylvania, and documented his entire journey on social media.
“Am off to walk to NY today. A slow stroll, I like to say, through the fast corridor. DC to Manhattan. Off to take in a founding slice of America. Talk to her. Wonder at her. Maybe make a little sense of her. Will paddle across New York Harbor before the end of April,” King wrote on Twitter shortly before starting his journey.
Along his 293-mile trek, King crossed the Susquehanna River over to Philadelphia then the Delaware River to Princeton and through New Jersey to the Hudson River.
Overall, the trip took him about a month and King says the entire journey was meant to help him connect with the history of America.
“I kind of wanted to go up into the area where there was the most kind of history to be seen and the widest diversity of types of Americans and kind of examples of our experimentation in the past,” King said.
During his expedition, he documented the old Mason-Dixon line, a room where a cabinet secretary played poker with FDR, railroad tracks Abraham Lincoln traveled through to get to Gettysburg, relics of Native American petroglyphs, the first U.S. military hospital ever built, the Statue of Liberty and much more.
“I never felt inclined to fill my ears with music or podcasts or audio books or anything like that,” King said. “Even when there's a kind of, sort of tedious stretch where you're walking alongside the shoulder of a road, I just found it engrossing enough I didn't really need anything else.”
He only traveled through four states, but he says when you think about the different cultures he experienced along the way, it feels much more like 10.
"I'm a little bit rueful that it's over, but it's been 26 days of really a wonderous experience and I hate to see it end, but so it goes," said King.
King says the journey taught him that if you sensitize yourself to serendipity and maybe doing something preposterous it can happen.
His advice for anyone thinking about doing it: plan ahead but, be open to surprises.
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign Up and Follow Audacy
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram