William Michael Ried

Five Ferries William Michael Ried

A one-way ticket to "Europe on no dollars a day" buys Stephen Kylemore a trip to love, loss and liberty.

With college behind him and nothing to tie him down, Stephen Kylemore yearns to escape a country and a family torn apart by the Vietnam War. Buoyed by his love of literature and a dream of living an odyssey of his own, he buys a one-way ticket for the journey he will come to call "Europe on No Dollars a Day."

Stephen joins young people from around the world on a road with no clear destination. He hitchhikes, sleeps in the woods, looks for work and trades one paperback novel for another to maintain his alternate reality. Sympathetic hosts smooth his path, eager to repay kindnesses they received on their own travels. He finds instant friends and transient romance. His months of travel inevitably reveal the circle of life and make him confront the tension and the passion he left behind.

Travelers of a certain age will recognize a world that seems archaic in this day of debit cards and instant communication. But time and technology don't diminish the universal human experience of survival and redemption, love, loss and liberty that await any traveler breaking trail.