“I’m trusting you to keep your mouth shut about this,” writes author Mark Orwoll, immediately taking the reader into his confidence—and for good reason. Much of the tale that follows reflects a charming, even raffish discredit on the writer, thanks to mild misdemeanors, questionable decisions, nonstop randiness, and a surprising (yet often endearing) naïveté.
The year is 1976, the ass end of the hippie era. These are the last days, as it turns out, of hitchhiking through Europe, before the world became too dangerous a place. The then-22-year-old author, as directionless in life as he is on the backroads of the Continent, is standing by the side of the German Autobahn, thumb stuck out for a lift, dreaming about girls, weed, and adventure. He manages to find all three, and much more besides, in large doses. He also manages to find his calling in life, as a journalist (which, by the way, led to a 40-year career in newspapers, magazines, and television).
Less a nostalgic paean to a golden era than a timeless coming-of-age story, Orwoll’s new travel memoir, Just One Little Hitch, is adorned with bullfights, recalcitrant camels, Beat Generation poets, unlikely friendships, Dickensian bookstores with Murphy beds behind the bookshelves, thievery, sex, hippie festivals, heart-rending generosity, strange and often disgusting comestibles, and other discoveries made across the face of Western Europe and North Africa. And all this at a time before the Internet, before cell phones, before social media. In those days, when you traveled, you were on your own, for better or (and all too often, in the case of Just One Little Hitch) for worse. But as any traveler will tell you, the best stories result when things unexpectedly go south.
With overtones of Bill Bryson and shades of Anthony Bourdain (in the words of award-winning travel author David Farley) but in a voice all its own, Just One Little Hitch is a memoir that will appeal to any reader who has ever traveled (or hopes to), anyone who was ever 22 years old and full of wanderlust, and those who simply enjoy grand adventures with offbeat, kooky, and (mostly) likable characters in exotic settings.