Peter Carlson quit looking for love and sought adventure instead. He found both

Nobody wears shorts in Turkey, and Peter Carlson’s bare legs were a spectacle on his morning runs.

“People sit and stare — the most uncomfortable thing ever,” he recollected over the phone recently from England. He’d been in Istanbul in March, when police arrested hundreds of protesters after the country’s authoritarian-curious president imprisoned the city’s mayor.

Still, “Turkey felt safe to me,” said Carlson, a longtime resident of Duluth's Lakeside neighborhood who was months into a year of traveling. In Istanbul, he ran 12 miles along the Bosphorus, the strait separating Europe from Asia, and admired the opulent Ottoman yalis — historic waterfront mansions (one recently sold for $111 million).

Standing over 6 feet tall, Carlson turned skinny when he began running ultramarathons, but his thighs remained like logs needing quartering before fitting into a woodstove. Turks curious about this large, naked-legged man often beckoned him to their tables for bitter cups of tea tempered by heaps of sugar.

“I can’t say enough for Google Translate,” Carlson said of his phone’s role in enabling Turkish tea chats.

In January in Duluth, he’d crammed his possessions into his son’s old room and rented out his house on Tioga Street. Then he flew to Europe and began wandering. He spent February in Germany, March in Turkey, and in April, bicycled from the Swiss Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.

Carlson hopes to visit five continents by 2026, but is not wealthy. He’s working full-time remotely as a project manager for a North Dakota masonry company. By May, he was telecommuting and sleeping in a British garden shed rented as an Airbnb accommodation.

"Nothing fancy, but I don’t need a fancy place,” he said, before ringing off so he could rent a bike for a weekend of exploring.

Of Norwegian prairie stock, Carlson moved from Moorhead, Minnesota, to Duluth for college in the late 1990s. He had straw-yellow hair; now, at 45 years old, he shaves his head. Carlson is divorced, and when his son graduated from Duluth East High School and moved to the Twin Cities, his newfound midlife freedom was tainted by loneliness. He tried online dating and hated it.

To socialize, he traded his home office for a co-working desk at downtown’s Duluth Creative Co. and joined an informal Spanish-speaking club. There, he became friends with Glenda LaTour, a teacher at Lowell Elementary School’s Spanish immersion program. LaTour began dragging him to the running groups she trained with, and, surprising himself, Carlson fell for running.

“It was cool to be a mentor to someone,” LaTour recalled.

Carlson ran his first 50-mile race in late 2023. He was coming to terms that he might be single indefinitely and decided to do the globetrotting he’d been daydreaming about alone.

“I don’t know if later we’re going to have the opportunity,” he said when asked about his motivations.“Trump could affect the ability to travel, Erdogan (Turkey’s president) could start a war, places could get too expensive for me, or maybe I get old and my knee doesn’t work anymore.”

On Friday, May 9, working in his rented tiny house in Exeter, England, Carlson reviewed plans for the stonework his company is installing on the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library, being built 4,000 miles away in Medora, North Dakota. He finished work and hurried to rent a bike before closing time.

Saturday morning, May 10, bike in tow, he caught a train to the coastal town of Torquay, then biked a winding road atop 300-foot-tall sea cliffs. He traced the River Exe inland, trading coastal hills for estuary flats, and followed a roadless peninsula between the meandering river and a boat canal.

“It’s England, so they have little pubs in the middle of nowhere,” he quipped.

Dozens of bicycles leaning against a wooden fence prompted him to stop at a 200-year-old inn for a pint. While sipping a red ale, he chatted with a man toting a pair of binoculars. Carlson and the British birder gabbed about the weather and the comic difficulty of rising from their comfortable chairs. The conversation was light, but Carlson relished detecting regional quirks and getting local information on out-of-the-way places to visit.

On Sunday, May 11, he traveled by train and bus 40 miles to Dartmouth and hiked a section of the South West Coast Path, a 630-mile seaside trail. He strolled through heathland blanketed green in short, tundra-like plants. Sunshine bursts of yellow blooming gorse shone from thin-soiled outcrops. The verdancy ceased above pale stone cliffs and pockets of sandy beach, where the cold Atlantic crashed ever landward.

The 14-mile hike was, he said, “one of the coolest trail sections in my life.” He wanted to keep going, to thru-hike, but had to work the next day.

“You don’t get to see everything,” he lamented. “At some point, it’s like, I’m going to see what I can see and that’s going to be it.”

Carlson hatched the idea for a year of traveling while visiting Spain in 2024. He’d gone in March to escape the late Duluth winter and to practice speaking Spanish, which he used at work on endless phone calls with Latino construction crews. In his free time, he hiked sections of the Camino de Santiago, a collection of historic pilgrimage routes maintained as hiking trails. During a few days off work, he walked 75 miles on the Camino, sleeping and eating in inexpensive hostels along the way.

His trek overlapped with a German elementary school teacher hiking alone over her spring break. Melli Reinköster and Carlson hit it off and hiked together until Reinköster returned to Germany. Before parting, they made plans to meet again.

Earlier, in Duluth, Carlson and an Essentia-St. Mary’s ICU nurse, Riley Beskar, had started a Thursday evening jogging club called the Mediocre Trail Runners.

In April 2024, Beskar, along with fellow Mediocre Runners members Glenda LaTour and Tim Krohn, flew to Spain to hike 100 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago with Carlson.

LaTour, who was raised in Panama, made her living teaching Spanish and was eager to visit what she calls the language’s “motherland.” She was burned out from regular life, and the time hiking with friends was restorative, making her realize, she said, that she "wasn’t doing such a bad job as a mom, as a professional, as a person.”

The trip wasn’t all serious, though. Reunited with his friends, Carlson tried to be nonchalant about his budding romance with Reinköster.

“He was tight-lipped about it. We had to pry,” Beskar remembered. “Glenda gave him a hard time.”

They delighted in making the big man blush about stumbling into love after he’d finally come to terms with living without it. When Carlson left Spain, he detoured to Reinköster’s place in Germany, delaying his Duluth homecoming by weeks.

In April 2025, Carlson and Reinköster spent eight days bicycling from Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 400 miles to the Mediterranean Sea through France via a bicycle route called the ViaRhôna. They followed the Rhône River when it was a “small, bright blue river,” as Carlson eagerly depicted.

The river started in the Alps and flowed into farm country, where it fanned into a wide delta populated by flamingos. “I got to watch the river grow from a baby river to a huge brown sprawling river,” he said, citing it as the highlight of his journey thus far.

On May 13 alone, he relocated to a hamlet next to England’s Dartmoor National Park. He arrived in the evening and went for a run through the prairie-like moors. "I like a nice boring town where people are in bed by ten o'clock, where the coolest thing to do is go for a run or bike ride,” he said. “I like going places no one’s ever heard of.”

The next day, when it was lunchtime in Duluth, in England, Carlson had finished his workday and was hiking up a tor — “a tall, naked hill with a rock outcropping on top.” He talked on the phone as he climbed past anciently placed, mini-Stonehenge-type rocks rising from the heather. There was no one around other than shaggy sheep and a plump brown pony.

He lost phone reception as he ascended and turned around to reconnect, saying he needed to hurry to reach the summit by sunset. He hung up and climbed. The drooping sun slathered the heather in gooey orange light.

Carlson reached the summit and caught his breath. His eyes followed the land’s undulating descent to the horizon, admiring the stacked horizontal bands of color rising from creamsicle orange in cooler gradations until reaching an eerie blue-black overhead. He started downhill in a race with darkness to his Airbnb.

Carlson will return to Duluth in July to run a 50-mile ultramarathon and canoe the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with his brother. Then, Reinköster is coming, and they’re going on an American bicycle tour.

In late July, though, Carlson will re-holster his passport. He’s thinking about South America, and he and Reinköster are talking about spending Christmas in New Zealand. His will to wander is undiminished.

"I like exploring and seeing new places; I like learning,” he said. "I’m driven by curiosity.”