The hardest part of being a constant traveler is missing the time and energy necessary to put into relationships at home. Close to that would be a few other things, such as people, even friends, being jealous of your lifestyle, and subsequently dealing with those feelings, and also the fact that travel, when it becomes a lifestyle and living, is no longer exactly the fantasy and pleasure cruise that it once was.
Harry Franck’s willingness to travel with no money, his keen eye for the details of his journey and the societies he recorded (some of which soon disappeared) make him a welcome addition to our list of Extraordinary Vagabonds.
Travel is not just moving over the earth from one place to another in some kind of conveyance. It’s not about where you’re going or how you’re getting there. It’s not about getting away from it all, at all. In fact, more the opposite … a way of getting to it all. Travel is a metaphor for life, a way of experiencing it more intensely and self-consciously. Traveling is not so much an action as an enlightened state of consciousness, opening you to fresh experience, to fresh looks at the world and yourself in it.
Going around the world hasn’t always been as easy as it is today. In fact, the great explorers of the past often suffered great hardships to see distant lands. One such extraordinary vagabond was Marco Polo.
Chris Guillebeau is such a genuinely nice guy that even the hater trolls can’t seem to hate him as he makes his way to every country in the world.
World travel was important to Che. Sure, you see his image on all kinds of clueless college kids t-shirts and hoodies and maybe later he was responsible for thousands of heartless deaths, but you gotta love that medical student who set out on his friend’s motorcycle to see the world.
Jack London’s life reads like an adventure novel. From being a vagrant to a pirate to working in the gold fields to learning to surf from Duke Kahanamoku, he lived forty years larger than life. Truly an extraordinary vagabond.
there is much more to this book than the adventures and misadventures of an American family in Italy – instead, this book is about finding the balance in our lives between work and play – it is about the importance of taking the time to really live – and it is filled with powerful messages that every stressed out CEO or entrepreneur needs to read
Not My America A Stranger in My Strange Land by Christopher Damitio Here’s the link to a PDF version so you can download and share it (It has page numbers and a table of contents and is the recommended way to read the book but the entire book is also below): https://vagobond.com/notmyamerica.pdf Lots of people…
I wrote this back in 2004. I’m pleased with how the rewrite in (May-June 2020) turned out. Maybe now I can begin on volume 2. Preface The Bodhisatva were wrong. They were remarkable souls who after being born countless times managed to achieve the level of human perfection required to move on to the…