Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.

Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there.

If you wander with open eyes and simple curiosity, you'll discover a much richer pleasure - the simple feeling of possibility that hums from every direction as you move from place to place.

In reality long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics, age, ideology, income, and everything to do with personal outlook.

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.