One for the Road by Tony Horwitz

A couple of weeks ago, I read Amazon.com: Books: One for the Road by Tony Horwitz. This was the 3rd of his books I’ve read (the first two were Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Went where he roams the Pacific in the footsteps of Captain Cook and Confederates in the Attic where he explores the “curious” hold the Lost Cause Mythology has on the Southern imagination; roaming the South and tagging along with a hard core Civil War reenactor.)

In “One for the Road,” Mr. Horwitz hitch hikes through Australia. The sheer volume of beer those folks seem to drink gave me a hangover just reading about it. Having done a small amount of backpacking and generally vagabonding around some of the Western states, I don’t think I’d be at all cut out for the sort of long-term rootlessness he writes about, but it’s nice to live vicariously through that sort of adventure, meeting all sorts of interesting people. The randomness of it all is part of the attraction. Though, having read 4 of Horwitz’s books, I get the feeling he has a knack for capturing the interesting aspects of whoever he meets. I don’t think he’s just getting lucky and happens to meet the really interesting people.