It’s been a minute since I flew anywhere. I took a few small trips in 2020 & 2021 to the SF Bay Area and the Big Island of Hawaii but for the most part since I returned home from Australia in March of 2020 – I’ve been staying on Oahu. I’m not complaining. I love…
I grew up in logging country. Oregon, Washington, Northern California. In logging country they had something that people in the rest of the world may not be familiar with. It was called ‘Beauty Strips’. Here’s how beauty strips work. Timber companies go in and they clearcut all the old growth forests. They harvest everything they…
I’m not sure if it is the intersection of Covid-19, technology, and travel or if I’m just older and grumpier but the only conclusion I can reach is that travel is awful and if you don’t need to do it to see friends or family or escape death squads – you should probably avoid it….
Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton was quite possibly the greatest vagabond in history. In his lifetime he lived diverse cultures, broke boundaries, and did most of it without much in the way of resources or travel money.He is this week’s Extraordinary Vagabond.
Every once in a while you come across someone that inspires the hell out of you. Emma “Grandma” Gatewood is one of those people.
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.
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.
This is an excerpt from my book “Vagabonds: Sometimes Getting Lost is the Point” . It’s available as an ebook for kindle or ebook readers. Over the next several months we will be exploring some of these amazing vagabond characters from the past (and present). Jim Bridger (March 1804 – July 17, 1881) was among the…
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.