However, when we reached Tarifa one day before finishing the ‘Coast to Coast’, we found a swim in both oceans simply requires a few strides across a causeway. If we’d thought about it for very long we could have figured that out already…we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort and only walked 5m between the seas. Which led me to the question of, why did we do it?

We did it because humans are funny animals that need to have purpose beyond surviving and reproducing. Or is that, we need to have other forms of ‘purpose’ when we have sorted out the problems of surviving and reproducing? We wanted to visit Sarah and her partner Tyler in London and go ski touring with Sarah in arctic Norway. We wanted to spend more than a month in Europe because it’s a long way to come from New Zealand. So we needed to find a rationale for another month.

There’s an infinite number of choices about what one can do in Europe so we narrowed them down by looking for somewhere to walk long distance. Our preferred holidays are either walking or cycling and we weren’t coming to Europe with both skis and bicycles.

Why walking or cycling? Because they are a method of travel where physical experience connects us to the place we are in, both at any point in time and across the entire journey. When you walk or cycle you are continuously seeing/hearing/smelling/touching/feeling the environment through which you move. At the same time, moving between places makes the journey as important as the destination. You aren’t looking for the best place to be. You are being in the place where you are.

Then all we had to do was find a route that was about the right length and in a part of Europe that wouldn’t still be snowbound in April, when we started, which meant heading south. We could have tried to make up our own route, and we have on some trips, but we opted for the easy solution of largely following a route suggested by someone else who has found all the tiny paths that connect between towns without requiring you to walk too much on roads.

So there we had our purpose – to walk between two places that are not particularly meaningful in and of themselves. To walk between two oceans we could have visited between by walking across the road. It shows how much cognitive dissonance one can maintain in that we didn’t bat an eye when we found the point where the two seas met. We just swam on either side of the causeway and continued our last day of walking to get to the end of a completely arbitrary distance at a completely arbitrary place (a closed surf life-saving shack). Like I said, humans are funny animals and we are no exceptions.