A while back b1-66er threw me a meme about books, and I fudged a little when I answered “a book that changed your life.” I couldn’t think of just one that made such an impact on me that it changed the way I move through the world.
But it occurred to me as I was packing up for the river trip I’m taking next week that there is one.
I picked up a dogeared copy of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door when I was in college, on a friend’s recommendation, at the Trident bookstore in Boulder.
It changed my life.
For “when I was in college” read: “busted broke and lucky to find a place that rented out for $190 a month because I was only making $450 a month and somehow managing to pay my way through college. Loans helped. So did all that oatmeal. And the gig at the Trident which let me tap into the caffeine pipeline for free.”
There’s not a lot of cash left over for traveling when you’re living on just about nothing. But Steves’ book taught me that travel is a choice you make -- you can do it for cheap, and if you want to do it badly enough you’ll do it instead of doing some of the other stuff that costs money. Like buying furniture or clothes. Or food.
From Steves’ I learned how to pack a bag (LIGHT. and roll things so they don’t wrinkle. load up your suitcase then cut it in half, then cut it in half again. and never pack anything that you won’t wear at least three times. AND be done packing for the big trips at least two days before, so you can just chill before you go.), how to picnic on the road to save money on food, how to bring just the pages that matter (“rip out appropriate chapters from guidebooks and staple them together”), how to pack a universal sink stopper and Dr. Bronner’s soap in order to wash out my clothes in my room and not to be afraid to wear my jeans wet the next day (paraphrasing: “you’ll be amazed at how fast they dry!”).
How to pack pictures of home and small gifts for the friends you’ll meet on the road. Which, importantly, I read as: expect to make friends.
I learned from Steves that you can never do it all but you can always come back, and I learned from him something that I only much later formalized in language but lives at the core of all the choices I make, the good ones and the bad, and it’s this: There are two kinds of wealth, Experiential and Material. Choosing one often excludes the other. Choose wisely.
