More buzz about Vagabonding

Reviews and profiles of Vagabonding are still trickling in, including a recent piece by Janet Fullwood in the Sacramento Bee. "Potts' advice about "earning to live, rather than living to earn" could be applied to many life goals," writes Fullwood. "In Vagabonding, he mixes meditations on travel with bits of philosophy and considerable doses of encouragement for those who would like to get their show on the road but don't know how." The Bee article also touches a bit on my current "Drive Around the World" expedition.

Elsewhere online, Michael McCarthy interviews me for his website, The Intentional Traveler. This interview, which can be found here, touches on all aspects of my travel career, from my current expedition across the Americas, to the time I got arrested jumping freight trains in Washington 12 years ago. "Vagabonding gives information on such things as financing your travel time, adjusting to life on the road, working and volunteering overseas, and handling travel adversity," McCarthy writes. "More importantly Potts shows that how you spend your time is what counts in life, as opposed to how you spend your money. With the clarity of a wise elder, Potts shows that despite how rich you are in material possessions, 'time is the only source of wealth that you really have.'"

After a certain point, the profile trails off into a series of quotes from our interview in Los Gatos over a month ago. Sometimes speaking is a way of thinking and figuring yourself out, so here are a handful of quotes that were fun for me to re-read and reconsider:

"My book is not about dropping out. Work is important, but make your work serve your interests instead of the other way around."

"When I was working as a landscaper in Seattle before my first trip around the U.S., I can’t overemphasize how much energy I got from thinking about what was going to happen to me six months, five months, four months down the line. I was mowing lawns, it was tough, it was very physical work. It was raining all the time, but I was so happy because that labor was earning me my freedom."

"These days I’m writing full-time. I can do it because I spend very little money. In Thailand my rent was ninety dollars a month. So if you don’t lead an expensive life then you don’t need a lot of money to get by. I just interviewed Tim Cahill and he said: ‘Look, a 23-year old kid out of business school is going to make more money his first year than I’m going to make on my best year.’ And that’s true. Travel writing is something you have to do because you love to travel and you love to write, because there is no financial reward. The reward is that you get to spend your time in this wonderful way."

"Peter Matthiessen talked about [spirituality] in The Snow Leopard, and Walt Whitman wrote about it a lot. It’s not nirvana. It’s not like 'I’m in this heightened state.' It’s: ‘I am where I am.’ Anything good is an ongoing process of learning and relearning and staying true. So in a physical sense, I am where I am because there’s no other place to be."