Supposedly the Katz character is based on a real friend, the same person he travelled Europe with as a teenager many years before, and recounted briefly in Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, written twenty years after his youthful backpack.

I just finished reading Notes from a Small Island written 3 years before A Walk in the Woods. It's another fun read about his trek (using public-transportation almost exclusively) to the furthest points of Great Britain. His humorous musings are mostly about urban England, but in it he takes many rambles across the countryside, although none so far that he doesn't find a warm (though sometimes shabby) B&B and a pub (often serving him many pints) each night. But in the book he tells of how he became infatuated with hiking (on a trip to a peak in the Lakes district long before this nostalgic trek.)

I think his popularity has come from his affable, self-deprecating nature that comes out so well in his books, yet he seldom pulls his punches in his criticism. And face it, we'd all love to get a big, fat advance to do something like hike the AT and then write down our thoughts on it.
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- kevon

(avatar: raptor, Lake Dillon)