Quotes on Backpacking

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.