Daddys home! Man who left family for 31,000-mile stroll around the world finally ends journey
Twenty-eight years.Four continents.
Zero rides.Karl Bushby finally made it back to his mother’s doorstep Monday.The former British paratrooper, now 57, threw his arms around his tearful mom, Angela, on the pavement outside her modest row house in Hull, the same northern England home he strolled away from in 1998.A “Welcome Home Son” banner hung over the scene as reporters, gawkers and a documentary crew jammed the street.“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby told the crowd.
“The kindness of strangers, so many, from individuals to nation states to get me back here today.I didn’t do this alone.
There was a big team.The biggest team.
Earth.”Naturally, he finished on foot.He hiked across the Humber Bridge into his hometown.Crossing the Humber Bridge into East Yorkshire on Sunday, he was greeted by his father, his brothers, his 36-year-old son Adam, and his 12-year-old granddaughter, whom he was meeting for the very first time, the BBC reported.
On Monday, he pulled into Queen Victoria Square in central Hull around 11 a.m., where hundreds packed a civic ceremony to greet him.“I’m back,” he said.
“This is absolute madness.” “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he cracked.“Is that it, is it done?”The whole saga traces back to a card from his dad.
In the mid-1990s, Keith Bushby, himself an Army veteran, passed along a debate raging among his special forces pals over whether a man could hoof it from London to New York by way of the Bering land bridge, the ancient crossing some scientists believe early humans used to reach the Americas when seas ran lower.Bushby, who logged 12 years with the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, quit the Army in late 1997 fresh off an ugly divorce and spoiling for a challenge.“I had something to prove to my paratrooper mates,” he told Backpacker magazine.He set two unbreakable rules.No vehicle could ever carry him forward, and he couldn’t go home until...