I think that is partly due to the fact that I first read it at 21 and I'm sure that like like most people my desire to experience new things without a safety net is strongest around that age.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Wikipedia

Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War. Jonathan Keeble stars as Laurie Lee in the celebrated journey from his Cotswold home in Slad to the South of Spain in the mid 1930s. The "War" chapter brings some more physical happenings aside from Lee's (mostly) aimless wanderings.

went on their way like somnambulists, walking alone and seldom speaking to each other. There seemed to be more of them inland than on the coast – maybe the police had seen to that. They were like a broken army walking away from a war, cheeks sunken, eyes dead with fatigue. Some carried bags of tools, or shabby cardboard suitcases; some wore the ghosts of city suits; some, when they stopped to rest, carefully removed their shoes and polished them vaguely with handfuls of grass. Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-30s. This has got to be one of the most evocative memoirs ever written; it certainly tops all the other road-trip/travelers tales I’ve read. As befits an award winning poet, Lee’s prose has a concise, 3-D image-making eloquence that drops the reader into the center of a scene, in the breathing presence of a character, or into the tactile truth of a landscape.

Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain

The final chapter, ‘War’, is more vivid than Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, and the whole book is loaded with great descriptive passages of 1930s Spain, like this:Lee would walk first to London, and then south through Spain, passing en route through a country on the edge of civil war. Several decades later, he would publish a book recounting his wanderings through that shadowed land, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), which has become a classic, celebrated for its evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the lushness of its language. I'm recommending the book for its strong writing quality, more than the "action" itself. I was left puzzling that he relates conversations with locals, presumably in Spanish, where I was left with a bit of suspension-of-disbelief that he would be chatting away so soon. urn:lcp:asiwalkedoutonem00leel:epub:2688f7a9-a038-4ca5-b5a8-6ad0bfcd42b4 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier asiwalkedoutonem00leel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3b00412s Lccn 76086542 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary_edition