In 2015, a New Jersey man set out to walk around the world with his dog; seven years and roughly 28,000 miles later, they made it back home

Most people would say it's crazy. Tom Turcich called it a plan. The day before his 26th birthday, in April 2015, a man from Haddon Township, New Jersey, put on his backpack and started walking. He figured it would take five years. Instead, it took seven. By the time he stopped, he'd walked across six continents and 38 countries, and he was no longer walking alone. A rescue dog named Savannah had joined him along the way. Much of what we know about his journey comes straight from him: in an interview with CNN Travel after he finished, Turcich described the walk, his dog, and the moment it all ended, from his parents' home in Haddon Township.

A walk that began with grief

Turcich's journey didn’t begin out of a desire for adventure. It started with loss. In 2006, his close friend, Ann Marie, lost her life in a jet ski accident. She was just 17 years old. Her death hit him hard. He began to think about how short life really is and how it can be over so easily without warning. That thought ultimately turned into a decision: he wanted to see the world on foot, slowly, step-by-step, rather than rushing through it in planes and cars.


He was not an experienced hiker. Before the trip, he had little travel outside of a school exchange trip to the UK and a couple of vacations. He wasn't going for a record. He was chasing meaning. A related body of research on grief offers a useful parallel: a study titled 'Losing a child: finding meaning in bereavement,' published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, examined bereaved parents specifically, and found that those who found meaning in their loss were more likely to report genuine personal growth afterward. Turcich's loss was different in kind, but the broader pattern of turning grief into a search for meaning echoes through his walk, one mile after another.

Finding a co-walker in Texas

Turcich started the walk alone, walking south from New Jersey to Panama. After about four months on the road, through Texas, he decided he needed company. He adopted a young Australian shepherd mix from a shelter in Austin and named her Savannah. That turned out to be a turning point in the trip. Savannah was there with him on the lonely roads and provided him with a sense of security at night. She went on to walk across deserts, mountains, and borders that few dogs, let alone humans, ever cross in a lifetime.

There's a reason that bond mattered so much. Researchers at the University of Sydney ran a three-arm controlled trial known as the PAWS study, comparing new dog owners against people who planned to get a dog later and people with no plans to get one at all, over eight months. They found that the level of loneliness was reduced among new dog owners within just three months of getting their dogs, and that effect held through the rest of the study. This type of companionship was not some pleasant bonus for a man walking alone through unfamiliar territories with no one around him. It was a matter of survival.

Life on the road, one mile at a time

Turcich and Savanna walked an average of 18 to 24 miles a day. It really adds up. In over seven years, that worked out to be about 28,000 miles. Together they crossed deserts in Chile, hiked through the mountains in Kyrgyzstan, and walked through open stretches of Kazakhstan. According to Turcich, Savannah was always more full of energy than he was, no matter how far they had already walked that day. On the 21st of May 2022, the two of them returned back to Haddon Township. There were friends, family, and even strangers on the streets waiting to meet them. While Turcich became the 10th person on record to walk around the world, Savannah was widely described as the first dog to do so.

Coming home brought a new set of challenges

You might think the hardest part was behind him. In some ways, however, it was just getting started. After seven years of following the same routine day in and day out, Turcich needed to adapt to ordinary life: rent, routines, relationships, staying in one place for more than a night. He has spoken openly about how strange and difficult that adjustment felt. Then, in May 2024, two years after they came home, Savannah passed away. Turcich has described her as his best friend, the only other living being who went through the entire seven-year journey with him. He later wrote a memoir about the walk, titled The World Walk, and has spoken since about how much he still misses her.

What his story teaches the rest of us

You do not have to walk 28,000 miles to find inspiration in this story. Grief can sometimes lead people to seek new meaning in life. Movement can help some people feel calmer. And the right companion can make a hard road feel more manageable. Turcich set out to outrun grief and ended up finding meaning instead.