Hiker walking across America passes through SWFL

FORT MYERS, Fla. — A man who walked away from a life in Corporate America several years ago is now hiking across the country.

With nothing more than what he can carry, Lubo Mirsokol is walking from Key Biscayne to the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Walking kinds of slows the pace of life for me, like I’m more present in that moment,” he said. “I try to just pay attention to what I’m doing and enjoy just small things, like the sun.”

Mirsokol is documenting the kindness of strangers he meets along the way on Instagram.

“Yesterday, there was a guy named Peter who just stopped on the side of the road and was like, ‘Hey man, I saw you walking here yesterday in LaBelle. Can I take you out to breakfast?”

Last year, Mirsokol had hitchhiked over 10,000 miles from Vietnam to the Czech Republic and wondered whether he’d encounter the same kindness in the U.S.

So far, he hasn’t been disappointed.

“The people I’ve met would be people I’d probably never meet in my real life before, whether I was living in D.C. or Europe, or anywhere else, but they were all incredibly kind,” Mirsokol said.

While Mirsokol isn’t walking to raise money for charity, he hopes to raise awareness that kindness can be found across all walks of life.

“I knew it [kindness] crossed borders because I went across Russia, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what race you are, what religion, it crosses everything.”