Considering Oslo is one of the most expensive cities on Earth, I actually wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull this one off without forcing myself not to eat.

However, my host, his friends and even a girl from CouchSurfing who I met for an hour to trade travel stories – all fed me. Frozen pizza, day-old baked goods, endless coffee, huge breakfast, dal soup and lots of fruit and veg.

I slept for free in a comfy bed at my hosts office in the center of Oslo city, showered and washed my clothes at his place too.

I was fed and full the whole weekend leaving only a few small meals to spend money on myself.

For sightseeing over the three days, walks around Oslo more than sufficed.

Without the hitchhiking, it never would have happened.

Only by fifty Kroner’s, but I made it!

Roundtrip Flight (STN<->RYG) – £36
Bus to/from London Stansted – £14
Latte & Pastry – £8 (NKR63)
Banana, OJ & Bread – £4 (NKR31)
Croissant – £4 (NKR32)
Hummus Sandwich – £8 (NKR64)
Bus to Rygge Airport – £17 (NKR140)
Weird Snack Thing – £2 (NKR15)
Lost £1 (NKR5)

TOTAL COST – £94

And I’m so hooked on not having a bag with me now. Ultralight travel is ultra-freedom. Hard to imagine going back!

I’ve heard stories from travellers older than myself about how there was once a time that it was great being an American abroad. They say people used to be curious to meet you and they had a wonderfully positive attitude towards you.

Obviously much has changed since then. Everywhere I’ve travelled, I’ve had to overcome stereotypes ranging from the infrequent ‘God-loving-muslim-hating-oil-theiving-mass-murderer’ to the more common ‘annoying-idiot’.

For the first time, this weekend I’ve felt like those American travellers 25-50 years ago must have felt.

The first experience came as a bit of a surprise. I had asked someone if they were from the USA.

This is something many travellers don’t do actually – asking people if they are from the USA. There is even a common habit of asking people if they are Canadian when you are thinking they might be from the USA. You do this because if they ARE from the USA, then you were close enough with your guess and if they are NOT from the USA, then you haven’t offended them. It’s true. I’ve seen people get offended by being assumed to be American. Anyway though, I don’t do this. I’m not that weakly apologetic.

So I digress.

“Are you from the USA?”

“No, from Norway. Why did you think this?” he responded with that rising tone which surprised me.

Was that a positively motivated inquiry? I wondered.

“Oh, your English sounds very American,” I said hedging my bets.

“Well thank you,” he said smiling.

Holy shit! Did he just say ‘thank you’?!

Yes, he did. And he wasn’t the only one. I started telling all the Norwegians I met that they sounded American, even when they didn’t, and everyone took it as a compliment!

Now I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the Norwegians are up America’s butt or anything. They appear to have a strong national identity and plenty of money and cultural pride to not need to identify with the USA. At the same time though, finally, they seem to be a country of people not afraid, not even embarrassed, happy in fact – to call the USA a friend.

England is close to this, but ‘American are annoying-idiots’ is still the common stereotype held by most Brits. It can be quickly overcome of course, but it’s there. To England, America is like their annoying little brother.

“Yes, of course I love you. I have to – you’re my brother. And yes, you can come with me, but just sit there and don’t say anything, OK?”

I had a chat with my American host in Norway about the feeling towards Americans here too.

“They love us. It’s great!” Brock told me.

Usually I rush through answering the ‘where are you from’ bit
when introducing myself to people, but in Norway it has generally been an enjoyable experience. Not that the answer to this question has as much value as it may have once had.

While I was following Brock down the stairwell in his building after finishing the typical Norwegian breakfast he had prepared for us, I asked him “Brock, do you still feel like an American?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know that I feel out of place when I’m home.”

Like me, Brock has been gone for over five years now.

“Yea, me too,” I said.

I know it may sound ridiculous, but I feel somewhat foreign wherever I go now…even the USA. I feel very much a human being, very much a man, very much white-skinned, very much English speaking, but as for a national identity…it’s not that its been replaced by anything, it’s just sort of faded away.

The dissolution of identity is an interesting experience and one I often encourage when helping people grow and make changes in their life.

But in this case, this weekend in Norway, it has been a pleasure sinking back into the identity of an American. I’ve enjoyed dusting those old shoes off, slipping into them, lacing them up and dancing around and being not only for people the man that I am now, but also for them, as they always desire me to be, the man where I came from.

At 11:10am, my flight landed at Rygge Airport, 100km south of Oslo.

Having sat in the first row and with no baggage to claim, I was first through immigration and standing out in front of the airport parking garage by 11:17.

It was a good spot, because both the cars leaving the pickup point and the ones leaving the parking garage had to pass by there.

I like to count things, so the moment I unfolded my Oslo sign, I started counting them.

1…2…3… This is funny.

4…5… Are they even seeing me? Of course they are…

6…7…8…9…They’re probably not going to Oslo…

10…11…Ahh…no space for me…

12…Oh there’s the cute girl from the plane…hmm…she looked at me weird.

13…14…15…Its so nice out today. The sky is so blue here. And the air…

16…17…18…19…20…21…22…23…24…26…Shit, 26?….No…24…Uhh…25!

26…27… Oh that’s nice, that old woman smiled and shrugged as if to say “Sorry, not going that way.”

28…29…30…31… Most of these cars are new BMW’s and Mercedes…I can’t imagine any of them stopping. I certainly wouldn’t have stopped to pick up a hitchhiker in my BMW, but that was the USA, where hitchikers are psycho-killers. This is Norway, where everyone is an angel…so of course someone will stop.

32…33…34…35…36…37…38…39…40…41… Maybe I should have stopped. Is this how karma works? I’ve never picked up a hitchhiker…what a hypocrite!

42…43…Hmmm…maybe after 100 cars I’ll walk to the roundabout at the entrance to the motorway….

44…45…46…47… I wish my sister didn’t tell my Dad I was doing this. I can’t expect him to get it. I barely do. Is hitching as an adventure OK? Or should it be left to the ones who really can’t afford it? This feels a little bit fake…

48…Oh, what are they doing? They stopped ahead of me and are just sitting there. That’s not how it works right? They are supposed to pull up beside you aren’t they? They are kind of far away… Ah, nope. Off they go.

49…Taxi.

50…51… I could have probably fit in the back of that van. That wouldn’t be very safe though. Wow…I remember how when I was 16, I carried friends in the back of my Chevy S-10 pickup truck…just like my friend’s construction company in Las Vegas does when they go each morning to pickup the Mexican immigrants by the side of the road and like cattle they transport their cheap labor army to the job-site and then at the end of each day they bring them back to the side of the road in that desert where they come from and they go back to… I miss hanging out with Harry in Vegas…what a brilliant guy…I’d love to go to Vegas with Head Hacking to teach street hypnosis this winter…

52…53… Maybe I’ll sit down. That’s comfortable.

54…Oh this is stupid. They can’t see me and I look broken. I’m standing back up.

55…56…57…What time is it? 11:40. I’ll stay until 1pm and then walk to the roundabout. Or should it be 100 cars?

58…59…60… They must be busy and in a hurry. I always was. Plus hitchhikers are smelly. I don’t want my car to stink. And I can’t see what they’re doing back there behind me in the back seat. This is a total karma fail. I so don’t deserve to be picked up.

61…62…63…64…65…66…

At 11:50am the 67th car pulled over, an old large pickup truck, it’s tires slowing and coming to a crunching hault beside me.

“I can take you to Oz,” said the man with a pony tail, leaning towards me over his Indian passenger with an arm stretched behind him out the other window tapping the ash off his cigarette.

“Oslo” I asked?

“No, Oz.”

“Where is Oz?” I asked, instantly zipping back in my mind to being 8 years old and eating apple crumble with Vanlaarhoven ice creme on my living room floor while watching “The Wizard of Oz” with my sister. My heels moved slightly as if to click …”there’s no place like home”….

“About 25 minutes from Oslo. I can take you that far.”

“OK, great!”, I said opening the rear door to the cab and jumping in beside a folded up roll of carpeting.

My driver, my first ever hitchhiking driver, was a German man, probably 40 or so, who had came to Norway a year prior. He had gotten some boots from his Norwegian grandfather many years before, but they were much too small for him. He kept them anyway though because they were great boots as they were made for Norweigan winters and his grandfather had worn them a d his grandfather was a great man. So he kept them in his closet. One day, years after receiving them, he was moving some things and found them again. He tried them on and to his surprise the darn things fit!

“What!? This is not possible!” my driver shrieked, reinacting the moment in front of the steering wheel for his friend and I.

He took the boots fitting as a ‘sign’ and took his son and packed everything they owned and up and moved to Norway to live in the woods surrounded by large stones of granite, which he needs to protect him from the radiation, that he can feel because he is very sensitive to it.

“There is too much radiation in Oslo,” my driver insisted, blowing his cigarette smoke towards his open window, which instead of exiting the truck only spiralled around behind him into the rear of the cab an encircled my head.

“Yeah…true”, I say, continuing to breath out slowly until the smoke had cleared.

The Indian man was from London too and didn’t talk much, except about the breathing workshops he was running. They were both ‘healers’ with magical powers, the kind I meet frequently at the fringes of the personal development industry. Despite my experiential disconnect, I could speak the language well enough to maintain rapport all the way to Oz.

At 12:15 my wizard dropped me off at a gas station by the highway, showing me where best to stand. By the way he handled it all, very matter-of-factly, I imagined he had hitchhiked many times before, and saw this not as a nicety, but as a duty.

Waiting at the E6 on ramp in Oz proved a bit challenging. At around 200 passing cars, I actually got to the point of considering other options. There was a bus stop at the on ramp, and when the bus for Oslo stopped, I did ask what it cost. Deciding NOK90 (£12/$16) was too much, I apologised to the driver for flagging him down and went back to my pitch.

A gorgeous blond Norweigan girl came to the bus stop and with her white earbuds on, standing a safe distance away, she waited, watching me suspiciously. I thought about asking her to hitch with me, because I heard more cars stop for couples than they do for single men, but she looked uncertain enough by my presence, so I left her be.

At 13:42 the 278th car, an old BMW driven by a younger man pulled over. He didn’t even open the window, just nodded and smiled, so I opened the door and got in. My second driver was a soft spoken Lithuanian construction worker with paint covering his overalls.

“This is not common here,” he tells me.

I had begun to figure as much by the curious way the Norweigan people had looked at me from their cars.

He told me he tries to stop whenever he sees someone on the side of the road, because he spent many years on the side of the road waiting for rides to school when living in Lithuania.

I was thinking my second driver would take me straight into Oslo center, but instead he dropped me off at a gas station on the outskirts of town.

From 14:08 to 14:27 I counted 47 cars waiting in Alna at the entrance to the motorway into Oslo City and then a guy walked up to me and said some stuff in Norweigan.

“What did you say?”

“Ahh, you speak English!”

He asked what I was up to, so I told him where I was trying to go and then he offered some advice…

“Take the T-bane. You don’t have to pay. It is very rare that they check tickets, especially on the weekend.”

He pointed over the small hill.

“It’s a 5 minute walk.”

By 14:40 I was on the T-bane, ticketless, and headed for the city center.

‘What a slippery slope this hitchhiking thing is,’ I thought. ‘It’s only been a few hours and I’m already an international criminal, riding trains without paying!’

At 14:56 I arrived in the center of Oslo to a big hug from my wide-smiling friend Brock.

“Come on, let’s take the tram. You don’t have to pay. I never do.”

And so began my introduction to one of the wealthiest and safest countries on earth.

My next Hundred Holiday will be for three days and two nights July 9th & 10th, in Oslo, Norway.

After flight £36 and bus £14, I’ll have £50 to spend in Norway.

Although this trip will be one less day than my previous trip, it will certainly prove more challenging.

Oslo is one of the most expensive cities in the world and the current exchange rate between Great British Pound and Norwegian Krone isn’t really in my favour.

Not that I’d eat one, but at the current rates a Big Mac in Norway costs about £10 (US$16).

To make things even more challenging, I’m not flying into Oslo itself.

I’m flying into a smaller airport in a city called Rygge, which is about 2 hours by bus from Oslo.

The bus isn’t an option though.

Bus fare would cost me about £20…and I need to eat while I’m in Norway.

So I will be hitchhiking from Rygge to Oslo…and then back again on Monday.

Truthfully, some of this is about facing an irrational fear I have of hitchhiking that was drilled into me as an American.

Rationally there is little reason to fear hitchhiking, but I’ve never done it…because, well…you’re not supposed to.

But I had a girlfriend once who hitchhiked all the time.

She started at 16 years old and even once hitchhiked with her dog from the middle of the USA all the way to Alaska!

I used to give her a hard time (“It’s dangerous!” “You’re crazy!”), but secretly I’ve always admired her for it.

After recently meeting two Lithuanian girls who had hitchhiked all over Europe, I decided I needed to stretch my travel comfort zone a tad bit more and start hitchhiking.

So what did I do? I picked the safest country in the world to hitchhike in!

Well safest as far as what this hitchhiking website says.

And actually, a Norwegian friend of mine said the same thing to me yesterday – that Norway is the safest place in the world to hitchhike.

So if you know anyone headed north from Rygge on 9th July…do have them lookout for me.

Here are the results from my first adventure with Hundred Holidays.

Ultracheap Travel Results

• £22 – Flights
• £14 – Bus (London)
• £26 – Food
• £13 – Tea & Coffee

Total Holiday Cost: £75 (US$122, EU€85)

Thus the total cost came in at £25 under my £100 budget for 3 nights / 4 days away. On my next trip I’ll probably spend more on the flight and stay one less day, so I can have more options on where to go.

Ultralight Travel Results

• Showered x 3
• Washed clothes x 1
• Borrowed toothpaste, soap and shampoo.
• No deodorant.

I started out feeling like I was forgetting my bag whenever I got up to leave somewhere, but then I got so used to not having a bag or anything at all with me that I left my jacket at the airport in Linz!

I never felt like I needed anything that I didn’t have with me (see photo) and I will actually shed a few items on my next trip.

No notebook or pen as the iPhone suffices. And I’ll bring one emergency credit card instead of two. This will leave me with literally an iPhone, charger, passport, cash, credit card, house key and a mini toothbrush. Don’t see how I could minimise that anymore!

I didn’t stink at all, but next time I may also wear my Vibram Five Finger shoes so that I don’t need to wear any socks. And I’ll probably wear an odor resistant synthetic t-shirt because it will be hotter out this summer and I don’t want to have to bring deodorant. I can borrow spray on deodorant from people wherever I can find it.

Overall I’m totally into the ultralight travel thing. It was such a free feeling to know I have everything with me whole having nothing with me!

I’m already thinking about doing a 2 week ultralight trip at some point, but probably outside the Hundred Holidays project.

The more time you spend with someone, the more you get to know them.

This is obvious.

What may be less obvious is that the more time you spend with someone, the more you realise you didn’t know them as well as you thought you did.

My first impression of George was a guy who was victim of his own psyche, that through a few unfortunate experiences had thought himself into a kind of psycho-physiological suffering.

Venturing far from home is a challenge for him. He never leaves the house without a briefcase and sidebag full of drugs and devices to ward of panic attacks, heart troubles and allergic reactions.

I took the opinion that the stories George tells himself (and everyone else) about who he is and what ‘conditions‘ he has are in some part responsible for the struggles he faces. And, to be honest, it was hard for me not to see this as a kind of weakness.

This was my premature, and in hindsight somewhat ignorant picture of George after spending only a day with him.

However, as more time passed and I got to know George better, I began to realise that the forces behind his categorical and impenetrable beliefs much more importantly, and on a more positive note, also make George a very remarkable man.

I believe in the philosophy that every weakness is also a strength, and I think for George, the things that hold him him back, also serve as a source of strength for the ideals he lives by.

George is a man of principle unmatched by few I have ever met. Not only does he believe strongly in what’s right and good in the world, but he stands up for it for himself and others, literally every single day.

“It wasn’t right, so I had to do something!” is a phrase George used many times during my four days staying with him in Austria.

I witnessed George set wrongs right over and over again as a friendly, and yet persistent, customer at shops and restaurants.

He told me story after story about the time he helped someone by making phone calls, writing letters and sending emails.

An African refugee got the right to stay in Europe and create a great life for himself.

A couchsurfing student, whose family could barely afford to send her to school in Austria, got saved from being unjustly deported.

You know how you might go into a shop and  say something to yourself like “Hmm…they should really take credit cards here…”?

Well, George had this thought about the food markets in Linz. And instead of just thinking it and going back to his normal life, he went home, wrote some emails and made some phone calls. Before long officials in the European Union got involved and now the food markets in Linz are accepting credit cards.

I wish I’d written more of these stories down, because there were so many of them. Stories of people he helped and things he’d done to make changes for the better.

Linz politicians have even recognised George as such a productive member of society that they have appointed him a ‘policy advisor’ and often invite him to meetings for his opinion on the ‘moral and ethical implications’ of their decisions.

George’s rock solid idealism is not the only force behind his serial altruism. He is also incredibly empathetic, and if it wern’t for his ‘conditions’, he would not have stopped after five years of saving lives as a volunteer paramedic with the Red Cross Ambulance service.

I believed George’s stories because I met some of the people he’d helped, and because in his Red Cross uniform, he very proudly took me on a tour of the ambulance service building, and because I saw him acting this way and doing these kinds of things consistently for four days straight.

Getting to know George better, and getting to know how much I didn’t know him when I thought I did, is what made this last part of his story even more difficult for me than it otherwise may have been.

George has a girlfriend of two years who he loves. However, right now, it seems Katharina loves her studies more than she loves him. Consumed with simultaneously pursuing a Masters in Zurich and a PhD in Germany, she has little time to visit George in Linz.

Although George didn’t speak of it much, I could feel his excitement that she would be joining us at the couchsurfing party he had planned for Saturday evening. So when he got the call Saturday morning that she would have to study in the other room while us couchsurfers hung out in the kitchen, George was obviously a bit deflated.

Katharina called again on Saturday when she arrived at his flat, which was empty, because George was out driving me around to see more of his city.

“She will be going straight back to Zurich, because she can’t find a place to study at the flat,” he told me softly after ending the call and gazing out over Linz, from the top of the highest hill on the outskirts of the city.

“Oh. Will she wait for you to come first?” I asked.

“She said she’s not sure.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

“Two weeks.”

George didn’t rush us through seeing the things he wanted me to see, but I could tell he was driving a bit faster.

At the entrance to his flat, I stood behind him, watching as he put the key in the door and turned it. If it were unlocked, half a turn would have opened the door. Instead though the key turned a full revolution and the door stayed coldly still.

In this moment, I watched George lean forward and slightly shake his head side to side. It was very quiet.

It didn’t make any sense to me. I could feel his pain and it hurt.

I asked him about it, but he didn’t want to talk about it. So we didn’t talk about it. Until the next morning at breakfast, when at a lull in our conversation, completely off topic, he inserted, “I think I’m losing Katharina.”

Despite my efforts, I failed to help him feel any better, probably becase my intentions were focused in a different, more selfish direction.

By that point all I wanted was for my new friend to see the perspective that to me seemed to be more true than his.

Not that George was losing Katharina, but as such a unique and remarkable man, she was losing him.

CouchSufing.org has 2.7 million members around the world.

That is a lot of couches.

Upon joining, despite whether you have actually surfed someone’s couch or not, you are officially a couchsurfer. You’re one of them.

And well, I guess I’m one of them too.

I actually joined many years ago when the site was just starting out. Evidently this gives me a bit of “couch cred”. (OK, I made the “couch cred” part up. It’s not that cheesy.)

They are budget travellers of course. Most not because they have to be – but because they want to be.

At anytime, as a couchsurfer, you may be either surfing yourself or hosting other surfers.

“CouchSurfer” is such a funny name. When my host was in the other room, I couldn’t help but stand on his couch and give a quick “surfs up” hand sign to the bookshelf who just stood there staring at me unimpressed.

These people not only host you on their couch, they act as your excited and helpful tour guides in their home cities. They even try to feed you a bit if you let them.

As an outsider, you would think that a host hosts and treats you well so that he or she can build up some credit to then cash in on other peoples couches. This might be partly the case, but actually the reward for hosting is more immediate.

For people like me (or ‘us’) who enjoy meeting and talking with people from different countries, if they don’t have the time or money to go travelling, they can have it almost as good by having the travellers come to them.

“I can travel the world without leaving my home,” remarked my host George.

I shared that this is essentially why I live in London. It’s like travelling the world while staying in the same city.

I learned most of this stuff on Saturday night at a small gathering of Linz’s top-ranked couchsurfers who George had invited over to meet me.

There were two Lithuanian girls, one with blue eyes who studies psychology and sings and plays the guitar and the other who walks on glass in the main square for income and who lives for almost free in a property George inherited from his gandparents. These two ladies taught me a lot about Lithuanian women and hitchhiking in Europe, both topics I found quite interesting. The guitar player’s boyfriend was from Linz. he was friendly, but didn’t talk much, for he was busy with his iPhone and it reminded me of how I must look during social time with friends I too often take for granted. (I’m working on it!)

Earlier that day George had taken me to a classical piano recital of a couchsrufing friend of his who came from Mexico to study musical childhood education in Linz. She had come to his small couchsurfing party as well and had brought her friend from Turkmenistan with her too.

Everyone spoke English except for the Turkmen girl and everyone spoke German except for me. So we alternated languages throughout the evening, translating after high points of laughter for the late enjoyment of myself or the Turkmen girl.

There was also a photographer there, who told me he no longer takes photos for high society clients because “a few of them are OK, but mostly I can’t stand to be around them”. I discovered he loves Berlin as much as I do and so we excitedly traded favourite cafe’s and shared our longing to return there.

The blue eyed Lithuanian played the guitar and sang with an soft voice, George, shifting between alto and soprano, sang over her with a church trained choir voice, and the rest of us tapped glasses with spoons and joined in for the few bits of the refrains we knew the words to.

We talked about the good and the bad of the European Union, the quirks and political beliefs of Austrian people, what to put on your sign to get people to pick you up when hitchhiking, teaching music to kids in Mexico, who’d done the longest non-stop train or bus journey and the couchsurfing parties happening around the world, including the one this Thursday in Vienna with over 500 couchsurfers scheduled to attend. We topped the evening off with a toast with some peculiar red alcohol that the couple had brought with them from Poland in a small unmarked bottle.

At 2am the last couchsurfers left George and myself to clean up piles of pistachio shells and empty glasses and I was very happy because the few hours I spent speaking and singing with such curious, passionate, open and adventurous people, was worth coming to Austria for.

The first time I ever left home on my own was in 1998 when I went to study at the University of Sydney. I had gone with a head and heart full of expectations, which upon arrival in Australia resulted in a mental and emotional shock so strong I almost turned around and went straight back home.

I remember standing in the phone box calling my parents, trembling with anxiety and with tears in my eyes.

“Mom, something went wrong. They don’t even have a place for me to live. I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

I didn’t turn back though.

Instead I met some other travellers and feeding off their strength was able to get it sorted. Over the following months I had some of the most unexpected and yet most cherished experiences of my life.

Despite this lesson, I still forget not to have expectations. (Or maybe its just impossible to avoid?)

And just like in 98, they are hardly ever met.

Somewhat insanely, not long after arrival in a new place, I never fail to ask myself “Why did I come here?”

And so of course this time walking around in the rain in Austria on Friday, I found myself asking; “Why the hell did I come to Linz? Was picking a destination based on what was the least expensive flight really a good idea?”

I also expected to be wandering around on my own meeting strangers in the street and in cafe’s, for these are my most vivid memories from travelling years past. But after sitting amongst strangers for hours and not talking to anyone, I began to remember and realise that between all the condensed memories of making friends in random places was lots and lots of time spent alone in my head, reading a book or writing. The memories of weeks spent completely alone had somehow vanished, but the feeling was coming back on Friday in Linz.

However, alike my first journey abroad, this trip was certainly worthwhile. I made some fantastic new friends, learned some interesting stuff about Austrians and discovered the breadth and depths of what couchsurfing really has to offer.

More stories on that coming in the next few days.

And with even more clarity about what I want my Hundred Holidays to be like, this week I’ll be buying another flight to somewhere I have never been.

Stay tuned and I’ll keep you posted on where and when.

It’s almost midnight on Friday evening and I’m sat in the corner of a loud cafe/bar on the main square in Linz, Austria. The Danube River is flowing under a bridge at the end of the square and rain is still coming straight down since about midday today. Let me catch you up on the last 36 or so hours.

The RyanAir flight went by like a blue and yellow carnival ride as I was heavily engrossed in an iBook about social networks.

Austian immigration smiled and stamped without a word and I walked hands in pockets straight by the conveyor belt carrying bags of stuff and between the sliding doors to the smiling face of my three meter tall couchsurfing host George.

“Do you want to go to my place first…or I guess you don’t have to drop anything off, so…” he was saying as we pulled out of the airport lot and onto a very German, smooth-paved motorway.

George took me straight to the lakes so I could see how each one was a different color, from neon turquoise to deep, deep blue. We went to a “beach”, which was really a green grassed park straight to the water’s edge dotted with lots of white skinned speedo and bikini’d bodies.

“We don’t really know these ‘sand beaches’ in Austria”, George explained.

On the way back to Linz, we stopped at ‘LandZeit’, a food and service stop on the side of the highway that people travel from far to because the food served there is first class and cooked on site from scratch. Even the waffle cones we ate the three scoops of ice creme out of were mixed baked and rolled there.

“If my body could do it, I would live off ice creme,” George told me.

“Wow,” he continued. “I’ve never seen anyone finish faster than me. Usually I’m always done first.”

“Yeah, well I’m an American. We’re good at that,” I responded. “You should see me eat popcorn. I use two hands.”

We stopped at a shop to get George’s favourite bread, a special recipe which would come to symbolise his charming peculiarities.

“Here’s your couch.” George said pointing to a futon with fresh linens piled on it.

We sat in his office and chatted as our conversation descended from stories of travels and travellers to George’s long list of allergies, heart problems, psychological disorders, medications, Dr and therapy visits and his impressive self coaching and recent growth. George is a remarkably open person, willing to share everything an unshaken by odd conversation, which I always appreciate and enjoy, however this combined with my insatiable curiosity, brought the conversation deeper than it may have needed to and before the first night fall I already had my CouchSurfing host in tears recounting tales from his haunting past.

Emotional conversations can be good psychological exfoliants though. An hour later George was sobered up and off we went to his employee’s birthday party at a small bar down the street in the Center of Linz.

Isabelle turned 24 yesterday and ten of her closest friends, plus me, had come out to celebrate. I’d only spent about €6 so far that day on a sandwich and some groceries, so the party food Ingrid dished up served as a nice final and free meal for this super budget travel adventure.

Stephen, from Romani, told me about his non-dogmatic spirituality and how the book “A Course in Miracles” was the truth. Then we shouted and laughed stories when we discovered his position as a city building inspector made him the guy who I most detested back when I was building properties in the USA.

“You are the son-of-a-bitch who makes me rip out and rebuild a $5000 set of stairs because the steps are 1/4 inch too short!” I accused Stephen.

“Yea, that’s me!”

Matthew, a man George hadn’t seen since high-school, is a “gallery-ist” now and was wasted while telling me over and over again how great America is.

“New York City is amaaaaazing,” he said touching his heart and with a glimmer in his eyes. “I’m going to go back there again. I have to. I just have to.”

I relish the few moments that people compliment the country I am bound to have come from, even if they are pissed off their head.

I also met Dr Miya, a Japanese-Koren art professor from LA and her boyfriend Theo, a Trauma surgeon, who she had met after getting into a cycling accident.

By 2am the smokey bar was getting to me and stanching my clothes and not typically enjoying crowds bugger than one person, George was happy to leave then as well.

Thanks to a quick wash back at the flat, my clothes were clean and dry by morning.

“Did you have plans for today?” I asked George as we were finishing breakfast of cheese, fruit and God’s greatest gift to humanity: dark German bread.

“Yes,” he responded, sounding surprised. “We are going to the lake in the Czech Republic.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, vaguely remembering him mention this yesterday.

We glided over long roads curving over green hills and through lush forest, holding the smooth pavement like the BMW’s do in the ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ car commercials. It wasn’t a BMW but it was obviously made by equally skilled engineers.

As we passed the Czech border, made up of a small simple sign reading “Czech Republic”, I looked long with imagination at the gravel lot where the demolished border guard buildings had once been.

The slight thump in the road as the pavement changed from Western to Eastern Europe, was all that physically separated the two regions now and for me, when borders go from steel barriers with armed guards, to a slight bump in the road, it always means something very, very good has happened in this world.

But Czezh Republic isn’t on the Euro yet, so when George went to pay for his 10 boxes of Czech famous flavoured sugar wafers at the border Duty Free Shop turned randomly-located Discount Shop, his card got denied.

“But it did actually work,” George attempted to explain to the team of confused Czech cashiers. After a long wait and phone call to his Austrian bank, they let us leave with the wafers.

The lake there was similar to the one in Austria, but with the clouds and mist now…it had a different eerie feeling to it. We walked around the touristy village surrounding the lake, quiet in the off season. I enjoyed being somewhere with such fresh air that you could breath it all the way down to your toes and so quiet that you could hear everything your feet said with wert little movement on the earth beneath them.

Back in the car George and I talked about our individual reasons for not watching TV.

“There was one of these reality TV shows. They were supposed to be ‘surprising’ the person at their house, but before the door even opened, the camera was showing the person from the inside going to open the door. How can they tell me this! It is so impossible! When they do this to me it makes my brain crazy!” George told me.

“Hmm, yea. It’s something like that for me too.”

Next stop was a World Heritage town called Cesky Krumlov. On the way into town, we remarked at the remnants of communism; propaganda loudspeakers on telephone poles now used to report community events and government food shops turned co-ops.

The old town was nice to walk around in, though after having walked through countless towns such as it during my earlier years travelling Europe, at best it brought me back to those times and not the history it represented.

On the ride out of Cesky, George told me the graphic story of each of the ten people who had died when he was working for the ambulance service.

By the time we got back to Linz, I was half asleep, clutching each breath of life I had remaining and it was pouring buckets outside.

“Let’s wait another half hour for the other couchsurfer to call and then if we hear nothing, we can go to eat,” George said as I finished washing the dishes from breakfast.

“Oh…you are going to come?”

“Oh…did you want to go alone?”

“Well, if you want to eat together, that’s fine. I just figured I’d get some solo time in today,” I said planning out some reading and latte drinking in my head.

“Ahh, OK. Then I will go meet my friend instead.”

After a cafe latte and some more reading of my engrossing iBook, I spent €8.50 on an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet which included sushi and ice creme (I went easy this time) and then came here to this loud cafe/bar where your’s truly is still sat in the same corner, now 90 minutes later, twiddling out a one-take draft travel journal post for you on his iPhone with his dexterous thumbs.

I hope you enjoy reading this at least half as much as I have enjoyed writing it for you.

Until tomorrow…

The stuff in the photo above, plus my iPhone (used to make the photo), is everything I’m bringing for 4 days in Austria.

When I first started travelling I had a backpack that equaled me in both size and weight. I carried two weeks worth of clothes, books, gadgets, a laptop, boots and all sorts of random stuff I was sure I needed. Even a skateboard!

Since 1999, much has changed about how I travel.

You see, there are different kinds of travelling I enjoy, such as long distance bicycle touring, city hopping with a backpack, road tripping in a campervan and even relaxing vacations at posh resorts.

However, these new adventures are about minimalism.

Spend less, because I enjoy the challenge and the unexpected experiences that come with budget travel. I also hope to inspire others to get out there travelling further and more often as well.

Carry less, because I’ve learned there is a certain freedom that comes with shedding “stuff”.

As Wayne Dyer said in one of his audio programs “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

It’s a way of life really.

My hope is that these trips will help me to meet lots of interesting people, to improve my resourcefulness and to experience even more deeply that ‘less is more’.