The travel industry is buzzing about Mark Orwoll’s new travel memoir, Just One Little Hitch. Here’s some of what people are saying…
“My train was called the Paris Express, possibly the coolest name for any rolling stock that ever chugged out of any station on earth.” This line leapt out at me soon after I started Mark Orwoll’s Just One Little Hitch. It’s indicative of the charm, detail, and quirkiness of this fascinating memoir. We are regaled with the tale of how a curious young man evolves into an all-seeing traveler. Orwoll shares his naiveté with us. He shares his discoveries with us. He shares his mistakes. And he invites us to ride along with him. He patches together a parade of fascinating, shocking, side-splitting, surprising, odd, humiliating, and eye-opening anecdotes, and fashions them into a travelogue that is somehow both innocent and sophisticated at the same time. It’s a super journey.
—Geoffrey Weill, author of All Abroad: A Memoir of Travel and Obsession
“With a sprinkling of the humor of David Sedaris, the storytelling wit of Bill Bryson, and an ounce of Anthony Bourdain’s snark, Mark Orwoll’s Just One Little Hitch is a fun, hard-to-put-down voyage through bohemian Europe at a time when mass travel was still in its infancy. This is a must-read for anyone who either wants to refresh memories of their own travels or to know what it was like to travel before the digital revolution.”
— David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity
“I’ve long enjoyed Mark Orwoll’s travel writing and was delighted to discover the genesis of his storytelling in this hilarious and revealing memoir. So fun!”
—Samantha Brown, host of the PBS series Samantha Brown’s Places To Love“
“A raucous and rollicking road trip through scruffy, bohemian 1970s Paris, London, Marrakech and beyond, Mark Orwoll’s coming-of-age travelogue is written with warm nostalgia for life’s misadventures, wrong turns, and calamities. Pure fun!”
—Luke Barr, author of Provence, 1970 and Ritz & Escoffier
“In 1976, hippies still roamed the earth via thumb. Luckily, this veteran travel writer lived it and nails it by resuscitating the Golden Age of globetrotting-backpacker travel before the social-media–driven look-at-me tourist apocalypse.”
—Bruce Northam, author of The Directions to Happiness
“A charming, often hilarious romp of a travel memoir that weaves together the author’s adventures on the road in Europe in the ’70s, with the history, oddities, and zeitgeist of the places he visits. Along the way, Orwoll picks up traveling companions, drops acid, and learns that travel will not just be a passing fancy for him. A terrific read for those with wandering souls (and soles).”
—Pauline Frommer, co-president of Frommer Media, host of The Frommer Travel Show
“Just One Little Hitch is the Innocents Abroad of hitchhiking memoirs. Mark Orwoll, escaping 1970s-beige California suburbs, uses his scholarship money to ditch school and finance a spontaneous overseas education, living in a fabled Parisian bookstore, adventuring through Morocco with a pair of Aussies, and thumbing rides from Pamplona to Stonehenge. His writing is so thoroughly entertaining, and his memories are so vivid, you’ll be reminded both of the poignant uncertainty of your not-quite-adult years and the thrill of discovering that the world is a wondrous place.”
—Kim Brown Seely, author of Uncharted
“Funny, touching, inspiring. An ode to the transformative power of hitting the road with no plan, and a marvelous look back at a forgotten golden age of travel, the 1970s.”
—Tony Perrottet, author of ¡Cuba Libre!
Mark Orwoll’s rollicking account of his travels brings vividly to life a time when the highways of Europe brimmed with youthful foreign hitchhikers blessed with nonchalant confidence, just enough money, and a willingness to try anything once. In describing the informal education of a young American on and off the road, Just One Little Hitch revels in the goodwill, kindness and humor he found from Wales to Morocco—except among camels, that is.
—Mark Abley, author of Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail
“Hitch” is a carnival of misadventures that, in a comic accumulation, actually point the way to the clarity of self-discovery. It’s the story of how the passing connections we have when we travel can often feel inconsequential at the time, but can still shape us for life. Orwoll’s affection for the simple pleasures of travel shines, and his knack for finely observed cultural detail is superseded only perhaps by his uncanny ability to recall the bygone prices of cheap beer. His shoestring odyssey down the road to his destiny makes for a breezy chronicle of many pints, late nights, and some indispensable advice about camels.
—Jason Cochran, author of Here Lies America and editor-in-chief of Frommers.com