Road 2 Elsewhere, Excerpt #38: Man vs. Cow, High Above Grindelwald, Switzerland

Wherein I discover my aptitude as a hitchhiker, meet another guy named Peter Moore (but decline to buy him a cocoa), and learn how to spell "dirndl."

THE SUMMER BEFORE I LEFT FOR PARIS, my dad fished an antiquated map of Europe from his shoebox of National Geographic treasures, and vouchsafed it to his wandering son.

He did the same, a few years later, when I was traveling with friends in central Africa, and it was, alarmingly, our only reference for a trip starting in Nairobi, dodging bullets and bo…