Very low tech high tech travel

AI helped plan my upcoming walk, but that's about all it's good for

Next week I'm going to set off from Milan to try and walk the two hundred miles to Padua. This will be my tenth long-distance trek, which I written about before, and I prefer these move-every-day-with-everything-on-my-back trips, but organizing them is immensely frustrating.

Finding a viable route requires spending weeks scouring maps (Google, waymarkedtrails, Komoot, and other specialized sites) so that you don't end up on the side of a busy road playing a game of dodge the side-view mirror, or hacking through overgrown fields where there was once a trail. That means dropping pins in Google Street View to check if I really can walk along a road without constant fear of death, and then checking on available spots to stop each night, since I don't camp, having long ago lost whatever small romance I once found from sleeping on the ground without a shower.

You need to do this due diligence because while solitary paths through idyllic fields (like the cover photo) are what you want, hope for, and are usually claimed by trail guides, the reality is often more of the pictures below, which are neither enjoyable, interesting, nor safe.

Now I'm not aiming for walks entirely through fields, mountains, and small villages. If I wanted those, I could get them by taking up camping, or hiking well-established routes like the Camino de Santiago. Instead, I'm intentionally walking through heavily urbanized regions, like the Rhine and Rhone valleys, because I travel to learn about cultures, and that means being where the people have long been, and still are, which in Europe almost always means along river valleys¹.

So I want and expect a certain amount of suburban sprawl, of intersecting tangles of roadways, of ugly boxy industrial warehouses, and even smoke-belching factories, because that, not pristine fields of rapeseed, is more the DNA of our modern industrialized world. Including in presumable quaint Japan, as I’ve found out in my three long walks there.

Seeing the unseemly connective tissue between the quaint instagramable downtowns is part of why I do these walks, because they are more the reality for most residents, and they are essential. Skipping past them in a train you miss the full picture of what it takes to keep our modern world up and running, and you can lull yourself into the fantasy that we’ve moved beyond the gritty past.

The left photo (from Fukuoka) is more the reality, the right more the anachronism, and so I expect and hope for a few miles each day of concrete and sulfur, and my choice of walking in Northern Italy, or the Po River basin, the most industrialized part of the country, was deliberate. Italy is the sixth largest manufacturing nation in the world, and that's as much of its identity as monumental buildings from eight centuries before.

So I knew I wanted to do a walk out of Milan towards Padua, but finding an exact route was harder than in Germany or France, because while the Po River was the basis of the region, it never had the commercial or navigable heft of the Rhône or Rhine, so it doesn't have the accompanying density around it.