“The paradox of nomadism. You keep moving because you’re searching for a place to stay. Once you realize you can live in other countries you can never quite settle anywhere again. You can never feel quite content.”
–Sahra, in Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance (1999)

After three years of monthly interviews with travel writers at RolfPotts.com, I was finally able to track down a longtime favorite of mine, Tim Cahill. I will feature an interview with him on the site in January, but — in the spirit of the holidays — I wanted to give Vagablogging readers a sneak preview, which can be found in its entirety here.

Without a doubt, Tim provided me with my funniest interview yet. “I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years,” he says, “but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant. So I kept my ambition a secret, like masturbation.”

Cahill goes on to tell of his early forays into writing, his involvement with Rolling Stone magazine, his founding of Outside magazine, and the challenges of reporting from remote places. His advice to aspiring travel writers is as follows:

1. This is not a way to make a lot of money.

2. The travel is difficult on your relationships with loved ones, unless they are coming along with you, which may not be possible. (see #1 above.)

3. If you are not in it for the money, it is — in my opinion — the best job in American journalism.

4. Editors, for the most part, don

“Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.”
–William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act Three, Scene Three

Note: Back in the mid-nineties, I resolved to read one Shakespeare play per year until I’d read them all. I’ll admit I haven’t been too good at holding true to this resolution over the years, but I did manage to read Romeo and Juliet this summer. I was struck as always by Shakespeare’s language, but also by his characters. Granted, as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder / that such trivial people should muse and thunder / in such lovely language” — but there always seems to be at least one character in each play with a good head on his shoulders. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, it is Friar Laurence, who gives the above advice.

Of course, Romeo doesn’t take the advice and the play plunges into tragedy — but my point here is that this can be good travel advice, especially for young people. “Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.” Indeed, it may seem like you need to assemble a life — job, home, serious boyfriend/girlfriend — straight out of high school or college, but the fact is that there is plenty of time to settle yourself into normal life (or, if you choose, to avoid a normal life altogether).

“Be patient, for the world is broad and wide” — so why not set your serious plans aside and wander while the wandering’s good? You’ll learn a lot in the process, and come back better equipped for your “normal” life at home. (And — trust me on this one — you’ll have a lot of fun in the process.)

After a week of furious key-tapping in Costa Rica, my Slate “Well Traveled” series is now finished and online. The first installment of the series, which is entitled Virgin Trail: Travels in the Other Central America, went live today.

At this moment, I’m due to hop a bus to Panama City to catch up with my expedition team, so there’s not a lot of time to elaborate. Hopefully I’ll have time to share more details once our Land Rovers have shipped to Ecuador, and I have a few days to rest….

My nephew, Cedar, who is four years old and lives on a farm in Kansas, wrote a book for me yesterday. Since he didn’t know how to mail it to me as I make my way through Central America, his mother (my sister) transposed it into an email. I guess I’ll have to wait a few months to see the illustrations, but I’ll share the text of Cedar’s masterpiece here. My sister promises Cedar made it up entirely on his own.

Here it is:

I mentioned our Drive Around the World visit to the taping of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno last month; here’s photographic evidence (click here for a bigger pop-up photo; I’m on the far left).

Our “in” with Jay was his mechanic, who bought one of Nick’s old Land Rovers some time ago. We also visited Jay’s garage in Burbank, and here’s a shot of just a few of his vintage cars.

From a PR standpoint, our visit to the Tonight Show taping didn’t do much for us, but it was interesting to see a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Jay’s world.

Greetings from Granada, Nicaragua. You may have noticed that I haven’t updated this blog much since I left Mexico. There is a reason for this: I will soon be writing a dispatch for Slate.com about my Central American transit, and I don’t want to spoil things for that article by talking too much about my experiences here.

If you want to get up to speed on the doings of our Land Rover expedition, check out dispatches from my expedition teammates at the Drive Around the World journal page, which I edit from the road.

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

“A traveler has no power, no influence, and no identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among.

Though I’ve been on the road since early November, I’m still updating my Writers page with profiles of professional travel writers. In November I talked with Islands in the Clouds author Isabella Tree, and this month I interview James Sturz, a novelist and travel writer who teaches travel-writing classes for MediaBistro. Be sure to check back in January, when I interview travel writing legend Tim Cahill.