To Travel Hopefully

"Travel, in a word, is for people who have nothing better to do." The slanted eyes on the other side of the vodka bottle narrowed. "It seems to me, my friend, that you have nothing better to do." Journeying along the road traveled by Robert Louis Stevenson in his famed travelogue Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes , fellow Scot Christopher Rush has written a modern classic. Accompanied by a donkey named Anatole, Rush tries not to make an ass out of himself on his journey from Le Monastier- Sur-Gazelle to St. Jean-Du-Gard. Realizing many of his worst fears, Rush is forced to ford raging streams buck naked, confronted by menacing hunters, lashed by torrential storms, often hungry and always directionally challenged. But with a little help from his friends Philip Larkin, Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno, Pablo Neruda and the Bard of Avon, the Scotsman turns these unfortunate events into a spiritual quest that raises the bar on travel writing. Following the agnostic Stevenson's path to a monastery where one of the monks resembles Buddy Holly, Rush discovers the "romance of those who are abroad in the black hours." A moving tribute to the memory of his late wife Patricia, To Travel Hopefully is Christopher Rush's poetic journey of the spirit through the south of France.