From soul to soreness, the Island Walk will make you question everything
CBC
As gentle-sounding as it is, the Island Walk is a test.
The roughly 700-kilometre roundtrip walk around P.E.I., which takes many people more than 30 days to accomplish, will weigh on the joints and muscles as much as it does the mind.
The journey will make you question just about everything. The answers are found somewhere along the way.
Half the trek takes place on the Island's hard-packed Confederation Trail, the other half takes walkers through red dirt roads, paved paths, boardwalks, grassy shoulders and many silent secondary roads.
Much of it is, to the imaginative, the road less travelled by. For Jeff Bauer and Karen Simpson, it's made all the difference in finding out more about who they are.
"Our approach is really to just get to the next waypoint sign. It is a trudge. Every day you feel joy, every day you feel pain, every day you're like, 'What the hell am I doing out here?'" Simpson said.
"You go through those emotions every single day and that's the challenge of it."
Bauer agrees with his wife, as he often does. He's here because he learned to say "yes" to the quests she puts on the table. They've walked mountains together and completed marathons.
"In the beginning of my mind it was 'No I don't want to do that. No. Walk up a mountain? Crazy,'" Bauer said. Eventually something clicked and he wanted in on the plans.
"I did it and it was life changing," he said.
The Island Walk was their next big feat to conquer. Another trial that just had to be done, they say.
This is technically their second attempt. Their first was cut short by Fiona, which flipped the Island's landscape upside down and shelved many travellers' plans to do The Island Walk.
But now they're back to see if they've got the fortitude to reach the end. If you ask Simpson, there's no shortage of courage between them.
"We love to test our bodies," Simpson said, her backpack covered in patches showing previous adventures around the world.
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