Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler’s Journey Home

Travel blogger Kepnes (How to Travel the World on $50 a Day) recounts his decade traveling the world and outlines the lessons he learned along the way. Bored by the postcollege life, Kepnes booked a trip to Costa Rica in 2003 because it looked “different.” He returned from that trip a “nomad,” he writes, and from there, his globe-trotting adventures continued for the better part of 10 years, and his passion for travel became a career when he founded budget-travel website Nomadic Matt. He visits Bangkok, Rome, and Prague, where he realizes that “hostel life forces you to confront the years of conditioning so many of us have endured about what we ‘need’ from our lives.” Throughout, he falls in and out of love with a number of women, including Samantha, an Oregonian he meets in Thailand, and Charlotte, a Chicagoan he meets in Laos; his wanderlust compels him to keep traveling and leave both of them behind. Eventually burned out by his rootless lifestyle, he settles in Austin, Tex., where he continues to run his travel website and write travel guides. Though Kepnes’s epiphanies aren’t exactly world-shaking (“My elsewhere had arrived”; “The world has a funny way of always keeping you in your place”), his stories will have readers plotting trips of their own. Fans of Kepnes and travel enthusiasts will enjoy taking this adventure with a reliable, amiable guide. (July)