Walking 5,000 kilometers: it is quite a task. But Barry Gepken does. He runs from Erica all the way to Jerusalem.
Gepken started the tour in June with his girlfriend Monique de Haas and their dog Maurice. But De Haas and Maurice had to drop out earlier due to health problems with the animal. Gepken now has three thousand kilometers on it. He is now in Greece, just past the town of Florina. Along the way, he experienced something very special.
As spartan as the journey itself is, so are the nights of Gepken. “I often sleep on tables,” he says. “Because it’s cold on the ground.” And it’s not boring during the day either: Gepken experiences all kinds of things. Likewise when he was walking along a lake in Macedonia and saw a car parked. That event, in his own words, was “one of the most remarkable things of his life.”
“I already saw that the man was leaning forward in the car. I immediately saw that it was not right, so I prayed,” Gepken said. He saw that people were already giving a heart massage, but the victim was sitting upright. “I said: it has to be flat.” Then Gepken took over the chest compressions. “But the pulse was dead, it was just dead.” Despite that, they continued until the ambulance arrived.
And then something really special happened: “At some point, some air came out of his nose, but I thought: that’s from the pumping. I’ll tell you: he just got talking again. We got him to life. “
This experience did not leave Gepken unmoved. Later, when he walked alone through a reed bed again, he had ‘tears in my eyes and shivers down my calves’. “It was so beautiful to do something like that, I thought: ‘I had to be there’. It really gave me the strength to continue. That was fantastic.”
Not only this, but many other experiences motivate Gepken to continue his endless journey. “The people you meet along the way and the beauty of our earth. And I just have good faith, I know: it will always work out.” Is there nothing that he can use during his journey? “A cup of coffee is welcome,” he says cheerfully.