After all these years, I'm finally nearing the end. I only have four walks left to do: one in the Bronx, one spanning Brooklyn and Queens, one in Manhattan, and one in Staten Island. I'll be doing the final walk on September 21.

The progress map will be fully updated soon, and I'll post some photos from recent years as well. Stay tuned!

I did my final walk in the Bronx today, filling in the last pieces of the map in Pelham Bay Park and City Island. Here to help me celebrate is one of the two nude sunbathers I saw on Two Trees Island (now with more trees!) in Pelham Bay Park.

This was the view as I crossed Betts Creek on the Jamaica Bay Greenway beside the Belt Parkway, taking my final steps in Queens before entering Brooklyn.

I intended to finish walking Brooklyn today as well, but I discovered after returning home that, due to Erskine Street being realigned in the years since my first walk in Spring Creek, I accidentally missed about 20 feet of a block on Vandalia Avenue. 20 feet! So I'll have to go back in the next few days and walk it before I can officially check Brooklyn off the list. If that sounds like a meaningless waste of time to you, I'd argue that the meaninglessness of this whole endeavor is the only thing that gives it meaning in the first place.

The late afternoon sun shone through the Javits Center as I walked my last stretch of Manhattan, down 11th Avenue to the Gansevoort Peninsula beach.

This could have been a beautiful day of pure absurdity, biking across Brooklyn just to walk the missing 20ish feet of a single block. But I ruined it by deciding to walk some bonus park and public housing paths while I was in the area. Oh well, what can I say? I'm a weak man and I couldn't resist their sweet siren call.

Pictured above is the short stretch of Vandalia Avenue that was holding me back from having walked all of Brooklyn. The final non-Staten Island steps of this journey have now been taken.

Today I walked my final blocks of Staten Island, the only borough I had left to complete. I was quite surprised to find the sign below waiting for me at the finish line, 4300 Amboy Road, which was the randomly selected point where I started the walk back on the last day of 2011. After spending 12+ years reading every dinky little plaque or marker I found across the city, I became genuinely emotional when I saw my own name on one of them.



I'll need to finalize a number of recent walks on my progress map before I have an official mileage count, but, using the rough versions of the routes I draw for my planning purposes, I've calculated a provisional total of 9,954 miles walked as part of this project. I expect that number will be within a mile or two of the final tally, which I should have within a couple of weeks once I've fully updated the progress map.



I passed by this menagerie shortly after finishing the walk, on a celebratory stroll to the beach in Staten Island. I have many thousands of other photos to post on this site in the months ahead. Once I'm done with the progress map, I'll turn my attention to that daunting task.