From soul to soreness, P.E.I.’s Island Walk will make you question everything

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.

"We want to stay young and energetic and be able to do these things. Motion is lotion. It's great for your body and your soul."

Hundreds of stories from the trailside

The walk caught wind fast since it was founded in 2019, and has been featured in The New York Times, BBC Travel, National Geographic, Forbes, Toronto Star, Canadian Geographic and more.

Headlines have been endearing, and stories told of The Island Walk call it Canada's answer to the infamous Camino de Santiago in Spain — a journey that takes roughly the same amount of time to complete as but has been around in one way or another for more than a millennium.

The Island Walk is often called Canada's own Camino and was created by Bryson Guptill, who completed and drew inspiration from the challenging Spanish pathways.

"I'm a bit of a map nut so this has allowed me to indulge that interest," Guptill said. "The whole walk was an opportunity to see parts of P.E.I. that we hadn't seen ourselves."

Along the way people will find beautiful ocean views, picturesque backroads, cafes, museums, inns and landscapes that remind you that postcards exist for a reason.

As quick as Guptill started it, it caught the eyes of federal and provincial governments as an idea to invest in. In the years since, it's bloomed into the landmark walk in Canada that it is today.

"It's done extraordinarily well," Guptill said.

"We thought there would be a few people who'd want to do it. We thought maybe, you know, 50 people might walk it within a couple years. We've now had 750 at least walk parts of it in the last three years."

People have come from across the world to take on the walk. Guptill says many visitors come from Texas, California, New York, Vancouver and Ontario. They have a lot to say about their own personal journeys on the trail, and the locals who helped between each waypoint.

"The stories that we're getting back, which are really quite touching, is people coming back the year after they do the walk to visit with the folks that hosted them when they were here," Guptill said.

"I love those stories. The stories about hospitality that they're receiving from Islanders. That, to me, is really what makes P.E.I. different."

Asking yourself the big question: Who am I?

One of those travellers is Laura MacGregor.

She's working on a book about her experience on the Island Walk, and she's come back to Prince Edward Island to rent out a quaint little cottage, sit on her own in nature and write.

"I love to hike, I love to walk. Like many people, walking is a place I can hear myself think. I can turn my brain off and actually be in the moment," she said.

"I can experience the world and myself in the world in some pretty unique and powerful ways."

MacGregor decided to do the Island Walk after her adult son, Matthew, died in 2020. He'd been born with a severe cerebral palsy and required 24-hour care.

"He was a goofy kid despite the fact that he didn't speak," MacGregor said.

The walk was where she found solace, meaning and comfort. It's where she could, in the quiet, ask questions about herself and life.

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On the trailside, by times, are churches and graveyards. She found herself spending a lot of time taking a break at these roadside churches, enjoying her lunch and spending time studying the stones.

"That became a really meaningful place for me both as a sort of stopping point as a place of respite, but also sort of the deeper spiritual experience," she said. "Of being so connected to other peoples' life and death stories."

This will never be forgotten. I'll always remember this 730 kilometers.

— Jeff Bauer

It was here that she looked for answers around her son's life and death, she said. While she found no answers to the big questions, the time alone to sit and ask and wonder was enough.

"If you asked me on Day 1 what I was asking for it would have been I was hoping to make sense of things," she said.

"I was hoping to finish and to know what I believed or what I felt about Matthew, about who I was after all of these things that had defined me came to an abrupt end.… There were no epiphanies and that's OK."

A takeaway she did have was that this walk gave her the opportunity to ask herself many questions she couldn't in her ordinary life and routine.

"Pilgrimage is this incredibly rare opportunity to step away from life," she said. "To connect with… meaning, however you define it in a really important way that is very difficult for many of us. We need to go to these places or find these places for that to happen."

Life measured in steps, not years

At the finish line is a bittersweet moment between Bauer and Simpson, who are taking their final steps in the long walk.

Their feet are throbbing and their muscles are sore after all the days on the road.

"You're really excited to finish it off but at the same time it's a little bit of a feeling of emptiness. What are we going to do tomorrow, honey?" Bauer said to his wife.

"We're going to sleep in and we're going to eat whatever we want," Simpson said. "And you know what, we might not drink water all day too. It might be wine."

They laugh, and Bauer thinks about the occasion. At first, before the walk, part of him was concerned about this experience. Not because of the walk, but because on this trip he turned 60 years old.

"Sixty is the first one that's kind of bothered me. The number 60, it sounds big," Bauer said.

But then, that's why he's here. Because life, to him, is measured in kilometres not years — and he's got many more steps left to go.

These steps he spent on P.E.I., he said, are precious.

"This will never be forgotten. I'll always remember this 730 kilometers," Bauer said.

"That's another reason to do stuff like this. If something doesn't stand out in your mind and leave an impression, you haven't really lived life as big as it should be. You're here once."