Potts introduces the concept of how work and pleasure fit into our lives, and how the first step of vagabonding is earning your freedom to take an extended journey. Yes, this speaks to financially preparing yourself to live on little or zero income. But it also advises how to handle your career, relationships, and attitude prior to taking a leap. Some of my favorite travel books are based on other people’s travel adventures, while travel how-to guides taught me that international travel is accessible to everyone, not just wealthy & retired people. This book is a wonderful combination of travel tales, science, data and psychology, mixed in with some of Erics famous sense of humour. In his search for answers, he will teach you the key takeaways from the world’s happiest nations.

He give some excellent, concrete ideas to those who want to travel but claim they can't afford to. He also helps us see how living a traveling life can be greatly rewarding. And also how "vagabonding" is really about being open to life. Rolf reached out almost a year ago about my helping him with some research and other interesting tasks for the Vagabonding update.Being on the road for an extended period of time has a LOT of challenges. Potts doesn't tell you what each of these challenges would be--that's impossible--but he does show you ways of thinking and doing that can help you get the most out of these challenges. Actually, he craved sunshine. He often went to work in the dark and then emerged later in the dark. Greg enjoyed eating mushrooms but determined that living like one wasn’t a healthy lifestyle.

Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking--and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but it relation to yourself." As someone who lives a nomadic life, I found enriching what he has to say about long-term travel and living an alternative lifestyle.There’s nothing like vagabonding: taking time off from your normal life—from six weeks to four months to two years—to discover and experience the world on your own terms. In this one-of-a-kind handbook, veteran travel writer Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Now completely revised and updated, Vagabonding is an accessible and inspiring guide to

In studying classic works of literature from across the centuries, one finds that the most affecting travel tales depict journeys as a metaphor for life itself. These stories don't presume to tell us where to go or what to do, but they do show how journeys can enlarge one's way of being in the world. These tales don't prescribe rules for living; they simply inspire us, by their very example, to live in a more engaged and dynamic way. Indeed, the purest approach to getting the most out of a journey has never revolved around itemized lists of travel strategies: The vagabond's way has always involved a simple and open attitude, a mindset that is inseparable with the way we pay attention to life itself.

Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teale used Muir’s example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society. “Freedom as John Muir knew it,” he wrote in his 1956 book Autumn Across America, “with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude of choice . . . such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.” Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes is one of the first travel books I ever read. It takes you on a walking journey with Robert and his donkey Mosestine across a mountainous region of France. Still, there are plenty of good thoughts in the book. At one point Potts rights about the balance and the difference between researching a location before going, as opposed to being open to the new experiences and the feeling of wonder while traveling. Travel As Transformation takes you on Diehl’s journey from living in a van in San Diego, growing chocolate with indigenous tribes in Central America, teaching in the Middle East and volunteering in Africa.

When in doubt about what to do in a place, just start walking through your new environment. Walk until your day becomes interesting." Robert Pirsig: "I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous ... attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things."Another tip: don't expect luxuries when globetrotting. It's ridiculous to go abroad and expect high-quality comforts and fawning service. Again: if this is your mentality, you may as well save your money and remain in America. Travel to Florida, Palm Springs, or someplace safe like that. Travel is about unpredictability, getting lost, getting detoured, getting ambushed, getting robbed, getting swindled, and having your plans disrupted. Just don't worry about it, that's all. Just roll with whatever comes your way.