Twenty-Six Years of Traveling Around the World

Apparently, I like to travel. I don't know if it's in my genes, or else my jeans or what but there was some sort of adventurous spirit in me from an early age. I first started hitchhiking when I was just seven or eight or nine, somewhere around there. I lived up a dirt road in northern California with my parents and younger brother. The school bus dropped me off at the bottom of the dirt road, and then it was a mile-and-a-half walk from there to our big cabin in the woods. At some point, I got the idea in my head to just kick back in the shade and read a book instead of walking, and catch rides with neighbors.

My global adventures began a decade or so later, when the day after I turned eighteen I hopped on a plane with an oversized, multi-pocketed bright red backpack bound for London, England and a summer of exploring Europe. I put my hitchhiking skills to the test by hitching from London to the southernmost extreme of England at Land's End (where one can gaze wistfully westward across the Atlantic and imagine all the previous, much more adventurous explorers who set out across that ocean, with high hopes of finding a better life in the land I'd just departed).

From that far end of England's land I turned back north and hitched all the way to the top of Scotland at John'O'Groats. I made my way across northwestern Scotland to the ferry and hopped over to Northern Ireland; hitched to the other side of Ireland; and then back again to Dublin, where I started using a Eurail train pass that would get me around the rest of Europe for another three months.

Gabriel Morris in Greece at age 18