The gift of sobriety is clarity and a sense of connection - and travel only enhances that.

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.

Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.