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I mentioned yesterday that I rented a car in Oakland, but I never included the humbling details of the automobile in question: It is a late-model gray Ford Taurus 4-door -- probably the least sexy car one could imagine for one's book tour. I'm not exactly sure what a budding young travel writer should drive...
Today was the day when, at no real choice of my own, I was forced to break one of the most basic rules of vagabonding. It was also the day that I learned (or at least was reminded of) one of the most basic tools of travel: talk to everyone , even if you're a...
Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon holds a place in my heart -- and not just because it's one of the coolest and most extensive bookstores in the world. Powell's is where I went to my first ever book signing back in the summer of 1992, when satirist Kurt Vonnegut came to promote a book called...
My Vagabonding book tour started in earnest this morning at about 4 a.m., when I woke up with a twinge of anxiety at the prospect of my first actual bookstore reading, to be held at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. It was a multi-faceted kind of anxiety, partly composed of beginner's jitters, partly due to...
After several weeks in limbo, I have finally converted the hurried scribblings from my gray pocket notebook into a coherent, narrative Book Tour Diary. It will re-debut here in Vagablogging tomorrow -- starting with a report from Seattle (entitled "What was the name of my book again?"), and continuing on subsequent days with dispatches from...
The American Booksellers Association has released its Book Sense Bestseller List for the month of January, and it looks like Vagabonding has cracked the Travel Writing Top 25, with a debut at #15. A lot of perennial travel favorites, such as Jon Krakauer's 1997 Into Thin Air and Peter Mayle's 1990 A Year in Provence...
Today
Well, despite having racked up eight very enjoyable Vagabonding book events on the West Coast and in the Midwest thus far, I
This morning I awoke to discover that -- in less than 12 hours -- the Amazon.com ranking of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel had fallen over 6000 points, from 2109th to 8216th. It was as if, overnight, the significance of my book had shrunk to a measly fraction of...
If there has been a distinctive moment that has defined my travels in recent weeks, it came this evening at a steakhouse-cum-strip-club in Portland, Oregon, called the Acropolis. There, amidst bare-breasted go-go dancers and pitchers of beer, I got a new perspective on what will no doubt prove to be one of the most unusual...
Jayne Clark from USA Today spoke to me about Vagabonding during a wee-hours phone call to Bangkok earlier this week. The result is this Q&A in the USA Today weekend travel section. "The book is a meditation on the joys of hitting the road for months or years at a time," reads Clark's intro. "It's...