I was raised on dinner table stories of the 60’s, of peace and love, of hitchhike travels cross-country America. My Dad, a songwriter and musician inspired by the Beat Generation, and my Mother, a well-traveled and charismatic soul, found each other by way of cosmic connection working at a movie theater. I believe their immediate connection was strengthened by a mutual love of psychedelics and herb, a notion they neither confirm nor deny. I believe my parents tell me tales of backpacking through Europe, living on a Kibbutz in Israel, riding across Morocco on a motorbike with past lovers to pass on the notion of adventure that existed in their youthful days. Thirty years down the road, my parents still embody and embrace these past lives, but their stories sound foreign and mystic as we laugh at that table in our affluent, suburban neighborhood in California. Fortunately, their memories of growing up a part of the Kesey and Merry Pranksters generation is the type of history they cherish. Through my parents’ stories I feel I have inherited a small spirit of the Further bus.
I am fascinated by the freedom of the 60s: days where there was nothing to fear and nothing to lose. I started a travel website, The Constant Wanderings, as a way to document my own life as a nomad with nothing but my own thoughts and a backpack to guide me. I wanted to tell my stories of meeting strangers in foreign land to provide other people with a reason to go out in search of something great—just the way Kerouac and all of the great authors of his time did for me.— Simone Spilka