AAA Essential Australia (AAA Essential Guides Series) Book

As a recently married transplant to Australia, Horwitz decided that he wanted to see the outback. Now, obviously, the sensible way of doing this would be to rent a car, load up on necessities, and make a detailed itinerary to follow. So, as will be obvious to anyone who has read any of his books, he had his wife drop him on the far side of Australia, and began hitchhiking. It's a pretty good travel book, one of my favorite genres. It was also a gateway to a lot of memories. I went through my hitchhiking phase, some ten or fifteen years ago. And though I never saw Australia in such a manner, I did spend copious amounts of time in the panhandle of Oklahoma. And there is something that haunts me to this day about walking along the road in the middle of nowhere, a land so desolate that you can see forever, where the only signs of the hand of man, beyond the road you stand on, are the ruins of dreams, the decrepit farmhouses and such, abandoned, and weathered in such a way that there is no way to tell how long they've stood vacant. You feel attached to the country, in a way you never could somewhere that man's tenancy shouts to all that someone was here. Anyway, good memories brought back, and I would have to thank this book for that, even if I hadn't been so enjoyable. His discussion of the type of drivers who pick up hitchhikers is dead on, and his observation that people in pickup trucks are more likely to stop than people in sedans- dead on. Recommended.