Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa by Ed Buryn, 1971.

I’ve been dipping into this book, sampling a chapter here and there. I bought it for 25 cents last weekend because the last sentence of the intro was "Can you dig it?"

It’s been a long time since I had long hair and counted myself a freak, but I can wax nostalgic about my hippy days. This book lets me dream a few psychedelic memories and recall that at one time I wanted to bum around Europe. I sent my dollar to the Youth Hostel organization and got back my little booklet. I plotted on a map of Europe the cities that I wanted to see and made note of where I could sleep for free or under a dollar.

Of course, I have to work during the summer to pay for college and richer but less cool friends returned from Europe with exciting stories of doing the things that I thought I might have done. Life gets in the way of having a life sometimes. I’ve never been off North America and my only foreign adventures involve brief trips to Tijuana and Toronto.

Vagabonding is a loose collection of bad essays on travel and is only good when Buryn forgets what he is doing and wanders down some interesting sidetrack or gets lost in a story of his travels. The book looks like a travel guide, but works much better as a travelogue and I wish that Ed had stuck with the stories and stopped trying to give advice on how to travel. He is a natural born story teller, drifting off into almost poetic tales, but he insists on adding all of the practical guide book things and he pretty much sucks at that stuff. Not that he gives bad advice, but it makes me skip ahead looking for more stories.

As a travel guide, I expect that it is so dated that it is fairly useless. As a crystallized moment, it is a great read, and brings me right back to 1970 as though I haven’t been living a dull short-haired life these last 38 years.

Ed is around and creating. He has a neglected blog, which might be a good place to start. Ed doesn’t have much a web presence, although there are many references to him. This book seems to have changed the course of a few lives over the years.