So much to talk about and so little time; this will, kick off what I hope will be an open, honest and at the worst case entertaining, accounting of our adventure to make a real difference in the Parkinson's community by walking across Great Britain.

It's 3 AM Wednesday morning, September 8 2021, in Scotland and I'm untangling a rats nest of wires here in Broughty Ferry, to get the live streaming "RV system" I've cobbled together, to work, when I get the alert I wasn't expecting for another day.

Times have changed and it's a good week when both of your polymerase chain reaction tests come back negative. I'm shocked at how quickly the results have been returned and the scale of the emergent industry that supports it. However, it was nice taking advantage of the scale, in that I could pick up my bags at the carousel and before I walked outside into the unseasonably warm London air, I was able to get swabbed in the terminal for my day 2 test, along the way of navigating the 6 hours of trains to get up north.

I'm really glad to have Kevin Murray traveling with me and will be walking as much as he can with me. I first met Kevin after speaking at the Northwestern Parkinson's Symposium in 2018. I then ran into Kevin again when I was visiting Joy's Neurobalance Center's Rocksteady program in Barrington Illinois, when Kevin & I both discovered we were going to be in Atlanta the next weekend for different reasons. Kevin was going with his brother to race their cars at road Atlanta and I was going to support Tamara Cantore, who came out and supported me on my first walk across the US, at her very successful Countrified Rock for Research fundraiser for Parkinson's. Kevin and his brother Tim, both ended up joining me at that event and I joined them with John Humphreys at Road Atlanta the following day, we have remained friends ever since.

Kevin and my arrival into Edinburgh had a Benny Hill like quality to it, in that there are four street levels at Waverley station. In tracking down our ride, I'm pretty sure we traversed all sides and all levels, and with ~100+ lb's of baggage each, to carry up and down stairs, it certainly was a good way to get the blood flowing after the five hour train ride from Kings Crossing.

Our ride in this case is Scotland's very own John MacPhee, who I am meeting for the first time in person, but have spent countless hours with on video chats and correspondence over the last few years. John is a tremendous inspiration to me and we certainly have a lot in common in that we are both Scottish, we were both diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2012 and we both walked across our respective countries. We also both share a passion for pushing the boundaries of possibility to do what we can to shake the world and see what falls out of it.

A quick dump of our baggage into the foyer of our apartment and we were off to the local pub, where we sat outside in this gorgeous weather and talked like old friends. And in a very organic and genuine way, connected with the majority of the patrons sitting around us, where invariably in conversation, the walk would come up. The feeling you get, when the faces of people, who have no connection to you, Parkinson's or anything other than proximity, light up and are genuinely inspired with what your about to undertake is hard to describe, but it's a great affirmation of the potential & importance of what we're doing. One of the highlights was a wonderful woman so passionate about what we were doing that in the company of her two daughters, with empathetic tears in her eyes after a prolonged thoughtful reflective pause, said she was going to go get her inheritance and give it to us right then, and that her husband who recently passed away, would've wanted that. We kindly refused, several times..... and after taking some pictures with them, left her passionately extolling the fact that she's going to get the whole town out to support us and raise funds for the cause, thanking us for what we are about to do.

It's great to end this incredibly arduous travel day and a half on such a high note and seeing the passionate reaction of the people we connect with. It's not only affirming, but a reminder of the incredible humanity that still exists between people regardless of our backgrounds, it's profound in the most basic way......I needed that.

Looks like I fell asleep at the computer before finishing this post, ambition meets reality and the past 48 hours without sleep caught up with me, as it should. It's 19:00 here and the fog is slowly rolling in, a beautiful Cascade around the town.

I'm anxious to start the day with a walk as we close in on less than a week until the start of this epic adventure, I hope that you'll join us.

@ParkinsonsUK 

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@CureParkinsons

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