Hi! My name is Kevin, but my hiker friends call by the “trail name” I was given on my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail: “Hungry Cat.” Unfettered Footsteps is a blog about my travel, long-distance hiking, and general life adventures on my quest to live a lean lifestyle free from the bondage of consumerism and workaholic culture. I hope that what I create here will help to inspire (or at least amuse) others who also may be considering, or already living, more unfettered, fulfilling lives.
Backstory
At 40 I left a fifteen-year career because I was tired of dealing with corporate politics, bored solving the same old problems over and over, and burnt out from years of being on call 24/7 with little work-life balance. I decided to do something for myself, so I spent 138 days thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. In embracing this new trail life and meeting people along the way, I realized how little I really needed to be happy (and to survive!). The lighter my pack, the more enjoyable my hike became, and a realized that this metaphor could carry into my off-trail, “normal” life. When I returned home, I started to think about all of the ways I could decouple myself from the things in my life that caused me to engage in activities that were not leading to fulfillment. I vowed to adventure more, to follow my heart, and to live a life untethered by the confines of consumerism and ridiculous workaholic culture.
Of course, then I rather quickly just slipped back into my old patterns of thinking! Two steps forward, one step back, and so it still goes today. The important thing is to achieve progress, not perfection. I hope that writing about my own journey can somehow help you on your own, whatever and wherever that may be!
Navigating this Blog
Unfettered Footsteps is a mix of traditional blog posts and collections of writings – namely my long-distance trail journals. I’ve used categories to group my blog posts by specific adventures or hikes, and further used tags to associate posts with common themes or topics. I have migrated this website from multiple platforms, and in doing so lost previous readers’ comments. You may notice that I address comments you cannot see in some of my journals.
The trail journals are daily entries from my long-distance hikes. For those, it is useful to start reading from the first entry for that category.
If you’re not sure where to start, perhaps you’re brave enough to start at the beginning! This would be my first entry prior to starting my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2018. You can find that HERE.
Happy trails!
–Hungry Cat
