3.5 stars
The Backpack years is a twin autobiography from the authors of this guide and is about their early grownup years spent travelling in Asia, Australia and components of Europe.
It begins a few years into the 21st century with separate accounts of how Stef and James got here to be backpackers and the place they met. Following chapters element their occasions collectively and their struggles with work, relationships and journey.
The guide is written in alternate chapters from Stef and James, so at occasions there’s an overlap of a scenario or a story. These are the memoirs of two younger folks making their tentative steps into maturity and all of the frustrations and duties {that a} life as a pair brings.
As a memoir about an essential period of their lives, I imagine that this works effectively and I’m positive that shut household and associates could effectively get pleasure from studying this as it is going to fill gaps of their information of the couple.
Nevertheless, in the event you picked this up for its backpacking and journey content material, do keep in mind that occasions passed off 15-20 years in the past. I’m undecided that I used to be the precise viewers for this guide, I get pleasure from armchair journey, however a few of the issues that these younger folks noticed and took half in made me fairly unhappy.
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Half journey, half romance, half failing at life, The Backpack Years intertwines two memoirs, charting Stef and James’s six-year journey from fortunately wandering to miserably settled and again once more.
Straight-laced Stef left America to check overseas in Spain, letting free and falling head over heels for 2 issues: a good-looking native and journey. Journey gained out.
James had a future in England he felt he’d already destroyed. Fueled by debt and a deteriorating relationship along with his father, James fled to Australia and located one thing higher.
After language mishaps in France and a topless night time in Tenerife, an terrible offal job in Warrnambool and a kidnapped manicure in Bali, Stef and James meet at an Irish pub in Sydney.
Although their adventures are pulling them in several instructions, they ditch the only life to forge a path collectively.
Can the 2 navigate their manner by means of red-tape, relocation, miscommunication, and a final ditch, make-or-break journey to attempt to save their relationship, or will this be their final journey as a pair?
Spanning 13 international locations and 4 continents, The Backpack Years is a narrative about how far we’re prepared to go to be with the one we love.
