Equipped with little more than my Youth Hostels Assocation membership card and a stiff upright thumb, I hitchhiked all over Europe from my early teens. My parents usually didn't know where I had been until a postcard arrived from Pisa or Bergen op Zoom long after I had already got home again.
One summer I tried to hitchhike from Salzburg to Cortina d'Ampezzo, made then famous by the 1956 Winter Olympics. My luck ran out at the bottom of the Grossglockner and I was so glad it did because it made me walk the full length of this magical High Alpine Road - click here.
I was reminded of this experience as I read "Walking the Camino - a modern pilgrimage to Santiago", in which Tony Kevin, an overweight, sedentary 63-year-old, describes his eight-week trek across Spain to Santiago. Many thousands of modern-day pilgrims have done the same, and a score or more have written a book about it - including Shirley MacLaine's "The Camino" - but Tony's book is full of interesting anecdotes and historical facts which make his book particularly interesting.
Although not (yet) overweight (but decidedly sedentary), I'm somewhat older than Tony Klein which means I leave the walking to him while I follows his footsteps from a supine position on the sunlit verandah.
