Pay off credit card debts, go without even the small extravagances, save your cash, quit your job, rent your house to match the mortgage, sublet your apartment, choose an area and then. There should be a good long spate of months available, and you need to be willing to whole-heartedly experience what you're about to experience.Īnyone, Potts says, can give themselves these gifts, but there is a catch.

It's a journey of the soul, of the self, and of the psyche-or rather, it should be.Ī vagabonder differs from other travelers in that he or she has allowed two pure luxuries to dictate a trip, that of time and sight. 29-sees travel as a much deeper journey than a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower. The author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (Villard Books $11.95), Potts-who appears at Corte Madera's Book Passage Jan. Now 32, he's been living on the money ever since, hitchhiking through Lithuania, being trapped for three days in West Beirut by his own sense of politeness, and staying for indolent stretches in Cairo and Thailand-staying, indeed, wherever the culture, new friendships, or even love kept him.ĭuring the six days that it took to set up an interview with Potts, he was alternately in Thailand, Kansas, and Los Angeles, cheerfully reporting in via e-mail as he went, offering a new cell phone number every other day. This time he had a nest egg of some $20,000 and a short-lived gig writing a biweekly column for. He lived simply, saved his money, grew up a bit, and took off again. When he was 26, Potts moved to Korea to teach English. 'It was a total failure,' he says by phone from a Los Angeles restaurant, 'though it taught me everything that I needed to know about being a travel writer.' Inspired by the Myth That Jack (Kerouac) Built, Potts wrote a book about his experiences touring America in search of warmth and experience.

He was no longer a loafing postgrad he was a vagabonder, as he calls it, and a travel writer, and his home would never be in just one place again. Thirty-eight states and eight months later, Potts realized that he'd found a new calling. So on New Year's Day 1994, he and some pals took off from their Northwest college home in search of sun. He had $5,000 saved, a few good friends, and the van was running OK.

When Rolf Potts was 23 years old, he'd had enough rainy weather. The New Bohemians: Rolf Potts has perfected the art of vagabonding, and the art is good.Īuthor Rolf Potts travels in search of that very small moment

Vagabonder book