By planes, trains, and automobiles, journalist Lou Salome has hitched his way through some of the most interesting - and volatile - places on Earth.

In September 1958, Lou Salome hurried past Barney McNeil's blacksmith shop to the town's blinking traffic light and began hitchhiking to college.

He was seventeen. Decades later his hitching experience led Salome through deserts and hostile zones in Asia, Europe and Africa. At the end of his internationalist life, he thumbed in the New Hampshire woods to gauge how times had changed. This is his story of the adventures, risks and the fun he embraced while engaging in a lost art.