The Problem with the Algorithm: Why Our Journeys Don’t Fit Neatly Online

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

 

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

Why the Internet Doesn’t Know What to Do With Us

 

There is likely no mistaking, when one meets us, reads our blogs, or follows our travels for any length of time, that we do not fit very neatly into one specific category.

 

This has always been true, but perhaps it has become more obvious with time. When we first set out onto long-distance trails, it was easier to explain what we were doing. We were hiking. We were walking. We were following the route from coast to coast. We were travelling slowly from one place to another under our own power. On the Camino de Santiago, we were pilgrims. On the Bruce Trail, we were end-to-end hikers. On the Trans Canada Trail, we became long-distance trekkers, conservation advocates on a #Hike4Birds, birders, photographers, RCGS Explorers, bloggers, speakers, and, perhaps most simply, two people trying to understand a country by crossing it slowly.

 

But even all of that is not quite right. It’s not the full story

 

Our journeys have never been simply hikes. They have not been only pilgrimages, expeditions, adventures, travel writing projects, conservation campaigns, birding journeys, or acts of endurance. They have been all of these things, and each is mixed with aspects of the others.  The result being that they have never fit comfortably into any one of them.

 

That is not always a problem in real life. In fact, on the trail, it is often the richness of the experience. The difficulty begins when the world - and especially the internet - asks us to become more easily searchable than we are.

 

We Do Not Write the Way the Internet Wants

 

The internet likes categories.

 

It likes answers that can be summarized quickly. It likes headings that promise certainty. It likes “best of” lists, gear rankings, top ten tips, definitive guides, simple questions, direct answers, and content that can be easily sorted into a clear niche. Are you a hiking blog? A birding blog? A travel blog? A cruise blog? A Camino blog? A Canadian adventure blog? A conservation project? A personal reflection essay? A photography or documentary archive? A practical planning resource?

The honest answer to each of these is yes. And of course no.   We are all of those things, and none of them entirely.  And that creates a problem. Not necessarily for us as people, but for the algorithmic world in which writing now lives. Search engines, social media platforms, and increasingly AI summaries prefer clear signals. They want to know what a thing is, who it is for, and what question it answers. The internet does not always know what to do with writing that wanders, reflects, doubles back, changes its mind, asks a question and then refuses to flatten the answer.

 

Unfortunately, much of life is like that. Much of walking is like that, too.

 

Hikes, Expeditions, Pilgrimages, and Something Else

 

Was our Trans Canada Trail journey a hike?

 

Yes. We walked thousands upon thousands of kilometres, carrying backpacks, pushing carts, filtering water, setting up our tent, drying gear, mending equipment, recharging, resupplying, and moving forward one step at a time.

Was it an expedition?

 

Yes. We crossed a country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and continued to the Arctic, documenting birds, landscapes, communities, trail conditions, and stories along the way. In Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, the scale alone - mountain passes, long road sections, rail trails, wildfire smoke, and snow- gave the journey the feel of something larger than a recreational hike or an end-to-end trek. The scope of our trek was so large it became more than a hike.

 

Was it a pilgrimage?

 

In many ways, yes. Not because it led to a cathedral, but because it demanded humility, repetition, discomfort, attention, and change. Like pilgrimage, it taught us that meaning rarely lies only at the destination. It is found in the daily act of continuing, in accepting help, in noticing the natural world around us, in being humbled by weather, and in discovering how little one really needs.

 

Was it an adventure?

 

Of course. But not always in the glossy, marketable sense of that word. Much of the adventure was not glamorous. It was road shoulders, closed campgrounds, missing signs, uncertain water, laundromats, grocery stores, blistered feet, awkward conversations, and trying to remain cheerful when exhausted.

 

So what were we?  Perhaps the closest description is that we are slow travellers. Or better still, slow explorers.

 

Slow Explorers

 

We like hiking trails, but we are not drawn to extreme outback experiences for their own sake. We are backpackers, but not ultralight purists. We are birders, but not twitchers, racing from one rarity to the next. Similarly, we love train journeys, but not because of luxury service or status. In a comparable way, we also love ships, but not because we are enjoy cruising from port to port, but for the time at sea. We travel – to be in a place or a moment and to learn from the experience. We set out to spend time in nature, to see new landscapes and to stand in the middle of an ocean and enjoy the peacefulness of the moment.

 

We have crossed Canada on foot, but we are not interested in presenting ourselves as superhuman athletes – because we aren’t. Much of what we have done was simply the result of stubbornness, curiosity, repeated adaptation, and the decision to keep going.

 

We have travelled by rail because trains allow the country to pace by something closer to a human pace than flying over it. We have crossed oceans by ship because sea days restore something that airports erase: the feeling that distance is real, that weather matters, that the world is large, and that arriving somewhere should take time.  In each of these cases, it is the journey not the destination that matters.

 

We have walked pilgrim roads, national trails, rail trails, mountain paths, coastal routes, and urban waterfronts. We have crossed bridges by shuttle when pedestrians were not allowed, taken ferries where the trail became water, slept in campgrounds, hotels, hostels, churches, albergues, cabins, and once even a haunted jail. None of that fits one category neatly.

 

But it fits us.

 

The Internet Wants a Niche. Life Gives You a Complex Web.

 

This is where the problem with the algorithm becomes more than a technical issue.  Perhaps the internet is not only asking us to categorize our writing. Perhaps it is also making each of us to categorize ourselves. Simplify ourselves. And simplify our understanding of the world at the same time.

 

We are encouraged to become brands. To define our lane. To pick a niche. To answer what people are searching for – clearly, definitively. To simplify our stories into something findable, clickable, and immediately understood. There are reasons for this, and some of them are practical. People looking for information need to find it. Someone wondering whether the Confederation Trail is suitable for cycling, or what the Trans Canada Trail is like in Saskatchewan, or whether road walking is required in Ontario, deserves a useful answer.

 

But life is larger than usefulness – it has too much complexity and too many contradictions to be so simply presented or understood.

 

A long journey does not remain one thing just because the internet needs it to be one thing. On Prince Edward Island, the TCT was a beautifully maintained rail trail with shelters, signage, red soil, beaches, birding, island hospitality, and a strong sense of welcome. In Saskatchewan, it became dusty rural roads, unexpected river ferries, the stunning Qu’Appelle Valley, historic ox cart routes, Snow Geese migrating overhead, and the discovery that the prairies were anything but flat. In Quebec, it took place across three separate years and seasons, from the Petit Témis to Charlevoix, the Route Verte, Montreal, the P’tit Train du Nord, and Gatineau Park - not as one clean crossing, but as a complicated return shaped by weather, timing, logistics, and life.

 

Which category should hold all of that?  Hiking? Birding? Canadian history? Slow travel? Outdoor accessibility? Personal essay? Trail guide? Conservation? Pilgrimage?

 

The answer, inconveniently (at least for the internet) is all of them.

 

We Do Not Directly Answer Questions Because the Truth Is Often Not Direct

 

This is one of the reasons our writing does not always behave the way the internet wants it to.

We can answer practical questions. We do answer them. How long did a province take? What was the surface like? Could it be cycled? Was there water? Were there campgrounds? Was the trail signed? Would we recommend it?

But the honest answers are rarely simple. And in some cases – especially on a trail – simple answers are at best incomplete and at worst dangerous to put out.

 

Can you hike the Trans Canada Trail? Yes, but not in the way many people imagine.

 

Can you cycle across Canada on the TCT? Sometimes, in some provinces, on some sections, with the right expectations.

 

Is the Trans Canada Trail an actual trail? Yes, and also no.

 

Are the TCT and the places it goes to in Canada beautiful? Oh yes – very often.

 

Is hiking across Canada safe? Yes, but also not always.

 

Is it worth hiking across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail? Absolutely, but not if you need it to be something it is not.

Those are not the kinds of answers that fit easily into snippets or search boxes. Yet they are the answers we would have needed before we set out. They are also the answers that respect the complexity of the country, the trail, and the people who may one day follow.

 

The experiences you have over 2 years (Sarah Jackson), 6 years (Come Walk With Us), or 10 years (Dana Meise) on the Trans Canada Trail are too difficult to summarize because they change the way everything else is seen.  Places are layered, people are complicated, and life defies simplicity.  

 

The Freedom of Not Fitting

 

There are, of course, advantages to fitting into a category. It helps people find you. It helps readers understand what they are about to read. It helps editors, algorithms, platforms, and search engines know where to place your work. We don’t want to pretend or suggest that those things do not matter.

 

But I am no longer sure we should want to fit too neatly into these categories and models either.

The older I get, and the farther we travel, the more suspicious I become of categories that explain too quickly. People are rarely one thing. Journeys are rarely one thing. A trail is rarely one thing. A country is certainly never one thing.  Perhaps this is why slow travel continues to matter to us. It resists simplification. It asks us to stay with complexity long enough for it to become meaningful. It teaches us that a place cannot be understood by passing through it quickly or reading the Wikipedia entry on it.  It also teaches that life cannot be understood by reducing it to a niche.

 

So in this way, we are hikers. We are also birders, writers, photographers, pilgrims, rail travellers, ocean-crossers, conservation advocates, slow travellers, and people who have spent a great deal of time trying to understand what it means to move through the world with focus and attention.

 

The algorithm may not know what to do with that.

 

But I’ve come to accept that is all right.  Because the point of setting out was never to become easier to categorize. It was to become more open, more attentive, more grateful, more curious, and perhaps a little more willing to live in the spaces between simple answers.

 

See you on the trail!