NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE
by Bill Girvin
An author shares the true story of a bittersweet vacation in Europe during his youth in this travel memoir.
Girvin shares the traveling exploits of a shared “European escape” in 1972 when he was a 20-year-old “long-haired hippie” hitchhiking across Europe with his high school buddy, Brad Cohen. The author, who describes his youthful hair as “California blond, down the middle of my back, thick, curly, and windblown from riding my motorcycle,” became disillusioned with his life in San Jose and took a college professor’s suggestion to travel to Israel to work on a kibbutz. The professor cautioned him, however, that the strife between Israelis and their Arab neighbors was a tinderbox waiting to ignite. Girvin doesn’t spare any details of his European trip prior to visiting Israel, offering snapshots and engaging details of a lengthy hitchhiking tour. This included stops in England and Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain, and there are accounts of beach parties on Corfu Island and time in Switzerland. The traveling friends separated, and Girvin endured a strip-search by armed soldiers when his plane landed in Tel Aviv; in Amsterdam, Brad wrecked the used Mercedes they’d bought, which Girvin had planned to sell for his own return trip. Stranded in Israel and without money, the author found himself working a demanding desert construction day job and a security night job to save funds. However, increasing tensions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks on the Israeli Olympic Team gave him little sense of stability. Overall, Girvin is a gifted storyteller who deftly transports reader directly into his travels, and his accounts of good and bad times will generate concern and rapt interest. The author’s bracing tale highlights how intoxicating and how treacherous life can become when one “make[s] a flip of a coin as to which fork in the road to take.” Armchair travelers and readers affected by wanderlust will surely relate to Girvin’s vividly detailed writing.
An adventuresome, page-turning travel journal.