Walk With Her

There are so many world-traveling women out there now and in history that I’d love to write about. But I am lucky to know personally one woman that travels more than anyone I know! Tyler Burgess has retired from years of leading walking tours around the world and teaching fitness walking classes in Eugene, but she still travels to amazing places and shares them with us in a variety of artistic media.

Tyler grew up on a ranch in Wyoming, attended the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and then lived in Montana before moving to Oregon. I’m sure the epic beauty of those states impacted her wanderlust, but she told me she was inspired to travel from hearing her mother’s stories of travel (her father who was stationed in the Pacific Islands during the war).

She founded her business “Walk With Me” in 2000. For many years, she gave walking tours in 10 different countries, taught fitness walking classes at the UofO and LCC in Eugene, coached marathon walking training, and directed four marathons.

Now she is officially retired from all that, but she is nowhere near done traveling. She packs a fold-up bicycle into her luggage for many of her trips so she can travel by bike across places like Sri Lanka. In Europe, she’s done a few different pilgrimages on the Way of St. James. She says she loves those because the local churches have been praying for the pilgrims for over 1,000 years, and the hospitality is amazing. Her son lives in Ecuador, so she has a good excuse to travel around South America, too. She says her favorite specific place to travel to is Venice. The destination isn’t the goal; she loves meeting interesting people on the way. Her most recent trip (as of the time of this writing; I started this post a while ago but she keeps going places!) was to bike across New England.

Fun fact: Tyler played a part in my going to Afghanistan before I even met her. My mom had met her years ago through the singles group at her church. When I was looking for a teaching job, Mom ran into Tyler and told her that I’d been offered a job in South Korea and one in Afghanistan, but was leaning toward Afghanistan. Despite having joined the army and going to live in Germany during the Cold War when she was half the age that I was when I went to Afghanistan (see my previous article about her journeys), Mom was understandably anxious about my decision. She asked Tyler what she thought I should do. Tyler said something like, “Oh, she should go to Kabul! What an opportunity!” Mom felt that was confirmation from God that I would be okay or at least was making the right decision. That helped me feel better about it, too, because I didn’t want to cause emotional distress for my family.

Years later, after I had returned to the U.S. and was teaching and living in the Eugene area, I found a couple of her Oregon walking guidebooks in local bookstores. One of them was about Eugene walks, complete with sketches of things she’d seen along the way. I did some of the walks from the book and loved them.

Now Tyler attends the church I do, so I am getting to know her myself! And I get invited to her travel talks. I’ve been to a few of them. It’s so neat to hear about her trips and look through her watercolor hand-painted travel journals. She also puts together fast-paced Youtube videos and writes about her trips on her blog. You can find links to those on her website https://walk-with-me.com/, but here are a couple photos I’ve taken of the pages in her travel journals. Postcards of her Oregon-themed sketches can be found in the Eugene Cascades to Coast (Travel Lane County) visitor’s center in downtown Eugene. And you can find lots of her books on Amazon, including city walk guidebooks and sketchbook diaries for some of her bigger walks like the Way of St. James in Europe.

If you’re in the Eugene area, I hope you get to meet Tyler! And if not, you can buy her books on Amazon.