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 bombs across Uganda, and over the Nyiragongo Mountains in eastern Congo. I’m lucky I didn’t end up on another planet.

My father’s NatGeo generosity was remarkable. He still hadn’t forgiven me for breaking up his multi-decade collection of magazines when I loaned an issue to a high-school girlfriend, who promptly cut it up for a history presentation. It became a mock-notorious event in our family, as if she had stolen one of my dad’s incisors, leaving a permanent gap. 

I did use his Nat Geo map during my time in Europe, though for the most part I considered myself beyond guidebooks of any kind. I wasn’t a tourist. This was my life. For the s…