Crossing Saturday Furlong is a European travel memoir for those who cant afford to quit their day job. The story unfolds between the cubicle rows of corporate America, then -in reminiscenceleads us down the thistle-strewn lanes between the hedgerows of Gloucestershire, and beyond.

While others exchange the customary greeting, Busy? Crazy as usualyou? the author daydreams in meetings about travels past and planned. It seems he has mentally dropped out. But is there more behind his casual veneer? To find out, we trace back to a younger self, who has walked off his job and persuaded his considerably less impulsive romantic interest to do the same.

They dodge terrorists bombs in Paris, get fogged in on a remote Alpine mountainside with a gnarled crone and a band of yodeling mountain men, stage a Chinese fire drill on a Roman bus, and are mobbed by babushka-clad matrons in the former Yugoslavia.

Passionate and demonstrative, he revels in his freedom, while she guards her feelings -and guards against being left without a room for the night. Looking closer to find her, he is drawn past the surface of their surroundings, and changed in a way that he never expected. He returns to his old work life, enervated by a new outlook.

Fourteen years later, married and stably employed, they return to Europe on a three-week vacation, with a much younger sister-in-law and her freeloading college classmate in tow. Confronting how the intervening years have changed him provides another learning experience, and it is travel once again that teaches him to be comfortable with his journey through life.