Vagabonding (By Rolf Potts)

An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics – age, ideology, income – and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn’t about being a college student; it’s about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn’t an act of rebellion against society; it’s an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive 'bundle of cash'; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.”

- Rolf Potts, in Vagabonding

In Vagabonding, author Rolf Potts makes the case for and shares advice on long-term travel – vagabonding, he calls it. A short read, the book includes tips on both the long-term travel experience and altering one's life to make such experiences possible. Potts is as much interested in sharing tips on living richly as he is in exploring the vagabonding experience. "[T]here is still an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to 'do well' in the world instead of living well." Living well, he proposes, is both a means and an end to the vagabonding experience.

In addition to humorous and helpful anecdotes culled from his own travel experiences, Potts provides a wealth of travel-related resources: recommended guidebooks, relevant Web sites, traveler message boards, etc. Among my favorite aspects of the book is his compilation of pithy expressions from the likes of Whitman, Thoreau, Annie Dillard, and others. If the author's words don't inspire, theirs will. For those who might have contemplated long-term travel without ever taking the leap, this book will push them over the edge (and increase the odds of their survival having finally taken the plunge)! Vagabonding is a nice little book to have around when considering or engaging in long-term travel. This one stays with me (in electronic form) wherever I go.