Lots of people have told me that traveling is so much better with someone else because you can share your memories with them. Huh? I don’t get it. If a hostel has a bar, is in Lonely Planet, or has the word “party” anywhere in its advertisements, I will avoid it like the plague. Why? [...]

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle, and get out! The healthy wayfarer sitting beside the road scanning the horizon open before him, is he not the absolute master of the earth, the waters, even the sky?… His estate has no limits, his empire no law. No work bends him toward the ground, for the bounty and beauty of the earth are already his.