The Three Mules walked through Martinez and Concord this week

If you did a double take on a Concord shoulder Tuesday, you were not wrong. The Three Mules came through.

The traveler's own site keeps a day-by-day log. It puts him in Benicia on Sunday, Sept. 13, Martinez on Monday, Sept. 14 and Concord on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The log runs a few days behind his actual position, by his own note, and holds back some locations to protect the people who let him rest on their land.

He calls himself Mule, sometimes the Monk. His site gives his age as 78 as of November 2025 and says he has lived outdoors full time since he stopped working in 2001, after starting the life at 36 and never missing a year since. The name is a holdover: the site lists Rosie as the mule traveling with him now, after Leroy was retired to a ranch in Valley Center in 2023 and Little Ethel went to a ranch of her own.

The route is seasonal. He winters in San Diego and Imperial Beach, turns around for the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Jan. 1, then works his way north toward Sacramento, stopping at city halls along the way to hand over what he calls a Declaration of Emergency. He covers five to 20 miles a day, depending on water, feed and how the mules are holding up.

The argument he is making is about open space. On his site he uses the word Megatropolis for the built world - "spreading sprawling concrete, putting up lanes, putting up buildings everywhere," as he puts it - and says it wants the public roadway for cars alone, and has no room left in it for pedestrians, cyclists or people on horseback. The hardest part of the life, he writes, is not the walking. It is finding a legal place to sleep at the end of every day.

"We are mules. We are from the outside. We live outside all day, every day," the site says by way of introduction. "We don't live in houses and we don't drive cars."

The practical question for anyone who meets him on Concord Boulevard or Alhambra Avenue is what to do. His site posts the answer as a standing reminder: share the road, slow down, and yield or stop to pass safely. California law is on his side. Vehicle Code section 21050 says a person riding or driving an animal on a highway has all of the rights, and all of the duties, of the driver of a vehicle.

He is heading east, and the tracker posts where he slept a few days after the fact.