Robyn Davidson, who didn’t exactly set out to write about walking at all, but did so brilliantly in the course of her Tracks, a book recounting her 1,700-mile trek across the Australian outback to the sea with three camels (sponsored, like Jenkins’s odyssey, by the National Geographic Society). Midway in her journey, she explains its effect on her mind: “But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversation I had had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. . . . And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.”

— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking 

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Notes:

• Photo: Robyn Davidson, Tracks: Robyn Davidson ventures 1700 Miles Across the Australian Outback by Camel
• Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again. Caleb is grounded in Work For Home and can’t come out to play this week.