Planes, trains, and automobiles? Hardly. Some travelers use their feet to go the extra mile (or 14,000).
Carlin "Buckwheat" Donahue could have done without the heat and humidity that still owned Miami in early October. When you're a resident of Skagway, Alaska, it's not like you live for hot weather. But his route was set, and if he was going to make it back to Alaska by Labor Day 2006, he'd just have to deal with it. When you're about to walk 5,500 miles and paddle another 2,400 by canoe and sea kayak, a bit of discomfort is to be expected. So October 1 and the Miami heat it was.

Donahue is a die-hard member of one of America's quietest subcultures: long-haul adventurers. They aren't extreme racers pushing for fasterfasterfaster. They're hikers, bikers, kayakers, and, in at least one case, a stilt walker, who just aren't satisfied with a week or two on the road. "It's the greatest life there is," says Ed Talone, who took up trekking in 1983 with a five-and-a-half-month hike of the Appalachian Trail. "You're seeing everything, and you meet so many people."

Before he hatched his own plan for a long, long walk, Donahue thought such adventures were "a shining example of people who had way too much time on their hands." But between September 20 and October 1, 2003, three episodes of heart failure and one heart attack nearly flattened him - permanently. "I really did feel like I was on the edge of the cliff and I couldn't look up. Everything was down. I thought I was going to die," he says.

Luckily, Donahue was out of town when his heart problems hit. The Skagway Dahl Memorial Clinic just isn't set up to handle heart attacks, and he probably wouldn't have survived. Upon his return from hospital stays in Juneau and Seattle, several friends gave him a treadmill. "I started walking a couple miles a day. It's just a real simple thing," says the 54-year-old director of the Skagway Convention and Visitors Bureau. Soon, the walks started to stretch in distance.