Overland Before the Hippie Trail

Summary

It is 1965 in this memoir when Patricia and her new husband set off on to Europe on their honeymoon. Little did she know that this trip would stretch into a two-year journey that would take them around the world on a bare-bones budget. While living rarely more than an arm’s distance apart in their VW van, they make their way from Europe and West Asia to South Asia, then continue across East Asia by train, bus, and hitchhiking. In those days with no mobile phones, no Internet, and few guidebooks, they were out of contact with family for months at a time while dodging a cholera epidemic in Iraq, staying in a palace in Pakistan, meeting a maharaja in India, and floating down the Mekong River in Laos. The journey had become a way of life, one in which they found a world that was not only large and varied, but filled with people who were curious, welcoming, and generous.