Backpacking Quotes

The rule of thumb for the old backpacking was that the weight of your pack should equal the weight of yourself and the kitchen range combined. Just a casual glance at the full pack sitting on the floor could give you a double hernia and fuse four vertebrae. After carrying the pack all day, you had to remember to tie one leg to a tree before you dropped it. Otherwise you would float off into space. The pack eliminated the need for any special kind of ground-gripping shoes, because your feet would sink a foot and a half into hard-packed earth, two inches into solid rock.

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

I'd really like to get on a Greyhound bus and go backpacking across America.

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.

We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities.

My meals were easily made, for they were all alike and simple, only a cupful of tea and bread.

I was a little hippie on a world backpacking adventure, and suddenly I became a vampire princess. I still find it hard to believe that it is real. I feel ludicrously lucky to have been chosen to play such a compassionate, complex character for my first film, and I am so grateful to all the beautiful people who made it possible for me. It was a dream come true. I felt like Cinderella every day, going to work with this amazing team on this dream script. If Cinderella were a vampire.

To equip a pedestrian with shelter, bedding, utensils, food, and other necessities, in a pack so light and small that he can carry it without overstrain, is really a fine art.

The man with the knapsack is never lost. No matter whither he may stray, his food and shelter are right with him, and home is wherever he may choose to stop.

I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free.

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.

I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.

Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest. Thoreau was right.

Even in these mercifully emancipated decades, many people still seem quite seriously alarmed at the prospect of sleeping away from officially consecrated campsites, with no more equipment than they can carry on their backs. When pressed, they babble about snakes or bears or even, by God, bandits. But the real barrier, I'm sure, is the unknown.

I see myself being married to my girlfriend and backpacking all over the world. If I can go out and do a 15-mile hike and climb a 12,000-ft. peak, I'm good to go.

Although the vast majority of walkers never even think of using a walking staff, I unhesitatingly include it among the foundations of the house that travels on my back.

In 1995, when I was backpacking through Europe solo, I would head to the train station, look up at the big board, and decide right there and then where I would go that day.

The man who goes afoot, prepared to camp anywhere and in any weather, is the most independent fellow on earth.

It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy.

Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.

Backpacking is the art of knowing what not to take.

When I was 18 years old, in a more innocent time, my first backpacking trip through Europe, I sneaked into the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum after nightfall and spent several hours in there avoiding the guards patrolling.

Under most conditions, the best roof for your bedroom is the sky. This commonsense arrangement saves weight, time, energy, and money.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

According to the ancient Chinese proverb, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. Mary

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

I see my path, but I don't know where it leads.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking — partly for the experience — it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Watch your step.