Around the World With a Spare Pair of Jeans is a humorous, engaging memoir of your 1975 journey along the Hippie Trail, capturing the challenges, discoveries, and unexpected kindnesses of budget travel across Europe and Asia. Why was this an important book for you to write?

For those who weren’t there, it is really hard to imagine travelling in a pre-digital world… no cell phone?…no GPS?… no instant cash or online bookings? Truly, in those days, when we were gone, we were really GONE! No safety net at all. That’s how we travelled 50 years ago, and looking back, it does seem challenging. Perhaps even foolhardy. So it just felt right to tell the story now….

Was humour your natural response to difficult situations?

Well, there’s usually a funny side to every situation, and I think finding the humour really helps soften the edges of difficult days. Certainly, things could have gone terribly wrong a number of times, and there was nothing the least bit amusing about the night in Teheran when two men tried to break into our room at 5:00 am.

How did you reconstruct the details of a journey that took place more than fifty years ago?

They say that writing things down carves the words into the brain…I’m sure there’s probably a long Latin word for it!… and since I wrote in my journals every evening, I had a wealth of material. Of course, we didn’t have TV, and it was dark (and cold) quite early at that time of year! I also wrote a lot of letters home…at least every week, sending updates on where we were, although leaving out some of the more scary details, of course! I also kept all the tickets, brochures, and receipts which I accumulated along the way. So when it came to transcribing the journals, I had a mass of information, and everything came back so clearly in my mind. It really is amazing to realize it all happened more than 50 years ago now.

What advice would you give young women considering independent international travel today?

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel jaded when we see awful things happening on the news, but most people are genuinely kind and good. I think it’s important to remember that travelling puts you in the shoes of a visitor, and being respectful in dress and demeanour goes a long way toward being accepted in new or very different communities.

Getting along and fitting in is really just a matter of common sense; nobody appreciates loud and rude visitors. As far as safety goes, again, use common sense!

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