Karl Bushby completes 28-year, 31,000-mile walk around world and returns to mother’s house

HULL, England — Karl Bushby completed his 28-year odyssey to walk around the world Monday by returning to his mother’s home in northern England. Bushby embraced his emotional mother, Angela, outside her row house in Hull, England, which he left in 1998.

They were surrounded by journalists, a documentary film crew and a large crowd outside the home that had a banner saying “Welcome Home Son.”

Bushby was a 29-year-old ex-paratrooper when he walked away from the home to a Royal Air Force base near Oxford and caught a flight to South America. He returned as a 57-year-old — softer, grayer and weathered, but far more worldly.

“They say it takes a village but literally it took a world to get me here,” Bushby said. “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.”

Bushby set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, on Nov. 1, 1998, and has walked 31,000 miles across four continents and 30 countries to get home. He navigated shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam across the Caspian Sea and English Channel to avoid…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/world