Kevin Thompson once weighed more than 300 pounds, but then he discovered the joy of walking.

Over the past two decades, he said he has walked almost every trail on Maui, where he has been coming for the past 25 years to get away from the cold of his home state Minnesota and to manage properties.

At the end of last year, the 69-year-old thought: “Let’s just do something different. We just wanted to have like a mission that would take up our spare time.”

The “we” refers to Thompson and his 21-pound, sheepadoodle Scooby-Doo.

The mission was to walk the entire distance around the island of Maui.

So on Dec. 9 from Kīhei, Thompson and Scooby-Doo began the journey that would be split into 34 walks and cover almost 300 miles, due to a lot of backtracking to the Jeep.

“When I started out, I just looked up about walking around the island,” Thompson said. “I found people who did it back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the most impressive one was that Eddie Pu, who did it 30 times.”

In 1976, Pu, a Native Hawaiian, had a dream that his great-grandmother told him to start at his home in Hāna and walk around Maui on the “King’s Highway” as a pilgrimage to preserve the ancient, sacred lands of Hawaiʻi, according to The Trek.

The King’s Highway, also known as the Piʻilani Trail and King’s Trail, was a mostly long-lost walking path around the island established by Piʻilani, a ruler of Maui in the 16^th century. It was rumored to have been marked by blue stones.

Pu was not the first to accomplish the feat. One documented account available on the Hāna Cultural Center & Museum website was by an 18-year-old from Connecticut named Ward Mardfin. In the summer of 1962, he walked for six days, calculating he covered 166 miles.

The trek began the day after drinking a lot of beer at a friend’s wedding and lūʻau. A previous attempt two weeks earlier ended in defeat when a very cold Mardfin wrote that he did not have enough warm clothes or a sleeping bag.

Thompson said he read about the kid on the Internet: “He spent like $3 on the whole trip. He listed what he was buying, including a can of tuna.”

The walk was done in sections, because Thompson said he was too old to sleep in his car or camp. But the route was hodgepodge, based on logistics of getting friends to be able pick him up at the end point of a walk and then drop him and Scooby off at the start. This enabled them to not have to backtrack.

But there were many sections he had to hitchhike back to the Jeep, or walk back on a trail, which led to an additional 80 or so more miles to the total. In many of those cases of backtracking, Thompson said Scooby demanded to be carried.

Thompson was staying in Kāʻanapali, making for long drives to and from some of the sections.

While logistics were challenging, so was the walk, especially along the Road to Hāna.

“We always tried to do everything so that we could face traffic, but there were lots and lots of spots with all these curves, where people couldn’t see you from either direction,” Thompson said. “So we would keep criss-and-cross the street.”

Scooby-Doo also wanted to walk in the middle of the road to avoid stickers, pine needles and rocks on his paws. Or when it was hot, he would seek the shady side of the road. Scooby also has his redline, and refuses to carry a backpack or his own water. He also doesn’t like to wear boots on his paws.

The pair made several memorable connections along the way.

While in Hāna, Thompson said he stopped in an area where three girls were sitting and told them about his walk. They gave him some fruit and one asked if he knew who Pu was, telling him that she was a relative of his.

He also met a guy who took him to the former home of Beatle George Harrison, a place Thompson said he had tried to find 25 years earlier. That excursion down a road that kept getting smaller and smaller took hours and cost him a day and required buying the guy cigarettes and lunch.

“I got his email and all that,” Thompson said. “When I go to Hāna someday again, I’ll bring him a cigarette.”

Along the route, Thompson said three times he and Scooby met a person who had participated in one of the two Ka‘apuni Torchlit Marches held in 2009 and 2015. The weeklong, 193-mile spiritual journey, covered all 12 moku or districts of Maui, with the torch providing physical illumination and symbolizing enlightenment, organizers of the 2015 march said, according to MauiNow.com.

Thompson said he met one of the marchers in Kaupō, and at first he was very unfriendly.

“I told him my dog and I are just passing through while walking around the island,” he said. “By the time I was done talking to him, he and warmed up to us and said he had been on the march.”

Thompson said in his research he could not find another dog who had walked around the island, saying “Scooby could be the first.”

Despite his little legs, 4-year-old Scooby loves walking, which began on a short section of the Appalachian Trail when he was just 10 weeks old.

Thompson said walking is addicting to him and his dog: “If I don’t get Scooby a pile of steps every day, he drives me nuts at night.”

Scooby wears an activity tracker made especially for dogs.

“He normally gets in a minimum of 30,000 steps, but a lot of days he gets in more than 60,000 steps,” Thompson said. “When I get in 20,000 steps, he gets in 60,000. … We’re not fast but got our miles down to under 20 minutes.”

Thompson said he never had a problem with people, although there was a road rage incident between drivers in two vehicles. He and Scooby had to avoid getting hit.

But domestic dogs were another case. Several times, Scooby was attacked by bigger dogs, including an Australian shepherd during a walk along a beach in Pāʻia. The shepherd started smelling Scooby and seemed like a nice dog before lunging at him and getting his teeth around Scooby’s neck. Fortunately, Thompson said, “the owner was right there.”

One group Scooby had no trouble with was the ladies. He was a chick magnet, with a cute face featuring one brown eye and one blue eye. Thompson said women of all ages loved him.

“He can’t go down the grocery store lines without getting more girlfriends,” Thompson said.

The duo stopped at as many banana bread stands, galleries and public places as they could along the route, and talked to everyone around, including a woman from Honolulu wearing a tutu and flying a drone.

“Meeting people was one of the best parts,” Thompson said.

So was seeing new places on the island.

“When I started out I had thought I had done all the trails, but when we did this walk thing here, you wouldn’t believe how many little side ones there are, where waterfalls are at,” he said.

“When you walk, you see way, way, way more,” he added.

In 2013, Haʻikū photographer Daniel Sullivan began a journey to walk about 220 miles around Maui, trying to find as many traces as he could of the King’s Highway that were tucked away in gorges, along cliffs and hidden in forests.

Not much is left of the King’s Trail, but Thompson said there is a two-mile section that is totally intact near La Perouse Bay.

The duo’s last major section was a remote 7.4 miles in Kaupō, before the very short 1/4-mile finale in downtown Lahaina, along Front Street, which primarily remains off limits to public traffic.

On March 2, they took their last steps of the journey to finish at the iconic banyan tree, which is fighting survive the aftermath of the horrific fire.

“Here we are Scoob,” Thompson said. “We almost got this baby. Come on. You donʻt have to walk anymore. I can carry you now.”

As they walked back to the Jeep, Thompson said: “It’s good to be able to finish something that you start.”

Then he turned to Scooby-Doo and said: “Now we have got to find a new mission.”