Freedom to Rome: FAQ

The questions people always have are:

“Why did you want to walk to Rome?”;

“Why did you want to walk to Rome?”; and, occasionally,

“Why did you want to walk to Rome?”

There are some others like: “How many pairs of boots did you get through?”; and then again: “Where did you sleep at night?”; “Which way did you go?”; “How long did it take?”; “How many miles was it?”; “Were you being sponsored?”; “Were there any dangerous wild animals?”; and “What did you do when you got there?”

They are all quite easy to answer:

- 3 pairs of boots/8 soles.

- 33 nights with friends/friends of friends; 23 at pilgrims’ hostels; 22 at B&Bs; 21 at pubs/bars; 15 at youth hostels; 10 at hotels; 7 with Hospitality Club; 7 at hikers’ hostels/bunkhouses; 5 with Servas members; 3 with Couchsurfing; 3 in caravans; 2 in abbeys; 1 on a ferry; 1 with a random stranger.

- From York through the east of England to Harwich; ferry to Hook of Holland; through the south of Holland to near Antwerp then across Belgium (Flanders) to Maastricht/Aachen; down through SW Germany via Frankfurt to the Black Forest; then up and down over Switzerland into Italy; round Milan via the plains of the Po, over the Apennines then down through Tuscany and Bob’s your uncle.

- We left our house in Fulford on March 1^st and arrived in St Peter’s Square in Rome on August 1^st, so exactly 5 months.

- A total of 1920 miles/3072 kilometres in 124 days of actual walking, so an average of about 15½ miles per day.

- We were raising money for Medecins Sans Frontieres to be able to stock mobile operating theatres in war zones and disaster areas.

- There were a few groups of wild boar and a couple of snakes, and once we came across a herd of unidentifiable wild animals ‒ something in between sheep and goats and deer.

- We slept a lot. It was boiling hot in Rome in August, so we’d go out and do the tourist bit in the mornings then have a siesta for a few hours then go out again at night. We stayed for just over a week which included a day in Ostia, the old port-city nearby, then got a ferry to Barcelona and made our way home by train and boat through France and England.

So that’s the easy ones answered. The difficult ones are the questions which people didn’t or couldn’t ask, like: “How did you manage to keep on going?”; “How many larks did you hear?”; “How many beers did you drink?”; and of course: “Why did you want to walk to Rome?”

I can tell you roughly how many larks we had heard before we left England because

we were counting them, and the 200^th was heard at the same moment that we passed 300 miles on the pedometer, on the last day, heading for Harwich. There must have been another 50 or so on the continent but we began to see and hear other birds then like cuckoos and kites, storks and orioles.

Beer, we discovered, is the chosen drink of the pilgrim, and by the time we got to Italy and joined the Pilgrims’ Way to Rome we already understood why. What better drink could there be at the end of a long hot day’s walk? Wine is not thirst-quenching enough, lemonade or Coke is too sweet. Fizzy water came close, but didn’t quite hit the spot.

We did manage to keep on going. Partly it was due to the fact that we had a destination to aim for, partly that we had committed to fulfilling a promise to all the people who had sponsored us. It helped if we broke each day down into sections, so we would do two or three hours then have a break; another two and stop for lunch; then a chunk of two hours, or two smaller bits of an hour and a half, before arriving at the next destination for the night, depending how far we had to go. This varied according to the terrain and also the availability of places to stay, so sometimes we would have to go further than we wanted to because there was nowhere to stop sooner, like the day we crossed the Alps at the St Gotthard Pass – there was no option but to keep on walking for hours in the pouring rain on the other side until we arrived at a place with a bed.

I suppose the answer to the question “why?” is hard because the answer changed as we went along. At the beginning we said we wanted to go for a long walk to celebrate, because finally Angela could walk again after a protracted problem with her hips had led to them being replaced with metal and ceramic joints. In the middle we were doing it because we could ‒ we were of a certain age with no responsibilities which demanded our presence at home, we could let out the house for the time it would take and we were still fit enough to undertake such an adventure. At the end we had done it because we had never been to Rome and we were just glad to be there: after all it’s one of the places everyone should see before they die. And then through and under it all lay a thread we had to follow ‒ which ran beyond specific times and places but made a connection between here and there ‒ the pilgrim’s trail, a microcosm of life’s journey, like treading an ancient labyrinth. People in the Middle Ages may have travelled to Rome or Santiago or Jerusalem to gain extra points towards their chances of going to Heaven, but I bet that when they’d done it many felt rewarded enough by the very experience of doing it…

SOME SPRINGTIME PICTURES

Our first steep climb in Germany.