How long could you walk in a straight line? What if the path meandered?
Starting from any point on Earth, how far could someone walk without crossing any major bodies of water? You may start by wondering how long it would take you to cross the contiguous United States — a feat that took on its own storyline in the 1994 movie « Forrest Gump » — and how many miles that journey would entail. The shortest route, from California to Georgia, measures a lengthy 2,339 miles (3,764 kilometers) and can take three to five months, though it depends on your pace, while the longest route, from northern California to Maine, comes in at 3,527 miles (5,676 km) and usually takes six months or more. However, the breadth of the continental U.S. pales in comparison with the length of the Pan-American Highway, a de facto network of roads that stretches nearly 19,000 miles (30,500 km) from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. While the route, which includes a walk across the Panama Canal via either bridge or lock, is unable to be traversed entirely by car — the roads of Colombia and Panama are separated by a 66-mile (106 km) stretch of dense jungle known as the Darién Gap — it has been completed on foot twice by different adventurers. Related: What’s the most sunsets you could see on Earth in one day? The first person to make the trek from Argentina to Alaska was British former sailor George Meegan, who began what would be a multipart,19,019-mile (30,608 km) walk in 1977, ultimately wrapping it up 2,425 days later in 1983.
