Keith Bushby was waiting on the English coast when his son Karl came out of the Channel on October 5, 2026. Father and son met on Shakespeare Beach, near Dover. To visit his mother at home, Karl still had about 250 miles to walk.

On November 1, 1998, the former British paratrooper set out from Punta Arenas in southern Chile for his mother’s house in Hull. Now 57, he’s trying to picture living in that house again. For 28 years, getting there has been his job.

Bushby made two promises to himself when he began his Goliath Expedition. He’d cover the distance under his own power, and he’d save the visit home for the finish. A break was fine. Other long-distance walkers, including Appalachian Trail hiker Dale Sanders, have split their routes into sections. Bushby’s condition was that each section had to start where the last one ended, even if he’d been away for years.

In Chile, drivers on Route 5 got to know Bushby by sight. He told The Guardian that truckers and bus drivers caught up with him again and again as he pulled his cart through the Atacama Desert. Someone would toss him a bottle of water. The driver could be gone before Bushby found out who’d given it to him.

Bushby reached Panama through the Darién Gap in 2001. In León, Nicaragua, he welded together a replacement for his cart. It held his food, camping gear and electronics, and it stayed with him for another quarter century. For the Bering Strait he needed a sled. In March 2006 he and fellow explorer Dimitri Kieffer took two weeks to reach the Russian coast from Alaska. They could lose ground while they slept as the ice beneath them drifted.

In 2012 Russia turned down his visa application. Bushby decided to make his case in person. His destination this time was the Russian Embassy. Starting in Los Angeles, he spent a year walking to Washington, D.C. The detour helped him get his visa, and along the way his son, Adam, came out to join him.

The miles Adam shared

Adam was eight when his dad set off from Chile. The visit he described to British GQ took place in 2014, while Karl was trying to get his Russian visa back. Adam walked with him for ten days. Keeping up with his dad meant covering 20 miles a day. As Adam told it in September 2026, they still spoke regularly. That walk was the last time they’d been in the same place.

Once back on the route, Karl walked through Mongolia and China. Farther west, border closures sent him looking for a way across the Caspian Sea. In 2024, with other swimmers and a boat crew alongside him, he made the crossing between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan in 31 days. In Istanbul the following year, permission to cross a bridge over the Bosphorus let him walk into Europe. At the Channel he tried for permission to use the service tunnel. Turned down, he went back into the water.

In October, Bushby told NPR, “I’d like to drag it out longer if I could.” The expedition had given him a reason to get up each day, even during the years when he could barely move forward. He told The Guardian he’d have to find a job and put time into getting close to his mother again. Adam is a father now, too. Karl has yet to meet his granddaughter.

Hull City Council expects Bushby in Queen Victoria Square around 11 a.m. on November 2. The lord mayor will greet him onstage, and there’ll be a private reception inside City Hall. When that’s over, he’ll head north on foot to his mother’s house.

Angela Bushby has had years to get ready. In December 2025 she told the BBC she’d kept up one Christmas tradition the whole time Karl was away. Every year she bought him a present. She remembered his answer when he heard about the presents. “Mother, you must be mad.”