Why not ask his son, who has joined him on sections of his walk, or at least read the abundant press coverage about the two and why Bushby was unable to follow his infant son to Northern Ireland?
He couldn't go to Belfast because he was active duty in the British military.
But, he left the army to do his around the world walk, which means that he could have left the army and gone to Belfast instead.
He and his adult son have a good relationship now seemingly, but that doesn't mean his son didn't need a dad growing up. Having said that, it seems like this dude had a whole slew of mental issues, so perhaps it was for the best that he wasn't around his son much while he was growing up.
In so many of these stories, once the parent and child have publicly reconciled as Bushby and his son have, the child is very annoyed by total strangers on social media continuing to harp on abandonment or injustice; it feels like an intrusion into their personal life that hbn or smt88 knows nothing about. So, you might want to ask whether your intervention here is actually sought.
This guy had a baby not too long before this and just left it behind. We should really stop talking this guy, he's not a great person as far as I'm concerned.
There has been plenty of press coverage of how Bushby was unable to see the child, because the mother took the child to Northern Ireland where Bushby was unable to follow due to his military status.
Do you know anything about the Troubles and post-Troubles era? In any event, there has just been so much press coverage of this very topic (and in recent years of a largely conciliatory tone) that your original post is not any kind of gotcha to Bushby, but rather just the usual social-media peanut gallery.
Bushby's walk has been extensively covered in the press (and in his own book about the Americas leg). Mexico served as his base while waiting for visas, permissions, and sponsorship, so he was flying back there and then, once he could continue, he flew back to the exact coordinates he had left off and started walking again from there.
Had a developer who worked for me who did something very similar. Lived all over the world, would get short term visas, and return to Mexico if needed to await his next visa. He had a friend that let him use his mailing address for work and mail and slept on his couch or in hostels while awaiting a new visa. He loved the life. Lived on a dozen different beaches while he was working for me. Apparently a Mexican visa is one of the easiest to get.
I found a copy of Giant Steps in a European bookshop circa 2008, so he was never an obscure figure. In any event, within the overland travel community especially, Bushby comes up occasionally for his walking across the Darien Gap (a region which is the bane of people traveling up or down the Americas), as well as for his Bering Strait crossing.
That's what I thought but then the article says it's supposed to be "with unbroken footsteps". I thought that literally was impossible in modern society and i guess it is
Does doing a lot of walking make it acceptable to leave your young kid and go globetrotting for 30 years?
But, he left the army to do his around the world walk, which means that he could have left the army and gone to Belfast instead.
He and his adult son have a good relationship now seemingly, but that doesn't mean his son didn't need a dad growing up. Having said that, it seems like this dude had a whole slew of mental issues, so perhaps it was for the best that he wasn't around his son much while he was growing up.
There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/europe/karl-bushby-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/oct/13/karl-bu...
They get a baby in the middle of it but keep going (maybe changing the rules a little ^.^). Still inspiring and heart-warming.
Turns out walking thousands of miles is the easy part.
for another source,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/exhibition-charts-karl-...
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
38 years, 5 months, 20 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Blessitt
Karl Bushby is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby