From Publishers Weekly
Whereas retirement from a successful career is often synonymous with a blowout party and the purchase of a sports car, former New York Times reporter Wren, who served as bureau chief in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg, chose to defy the status quo and celebrate his own retirement by hiking nearly 400 miles in five weeks from Manhattan to Fairlee, Vt. Though this is a solo rite-of-passage, Wren, who became known on the trails as "Super Tortoise" for his slow but steadfast pace, encounters and befriends fellow hikers from around the world. Along the way, they swap camping stories and compare equipment, and as Wren's course meanders through fields and mountains, torrential downpours and tranquil sunsets, he learns to find comfort in the muddy, wet and open terrain. Wren departs from New York armed with the basics, including a copy of Thoreau's Walden, and slowly leaves the city's frazzled pace behind. Accompanied sporadically by old friends out for a day hike, Wren sheds his would-be retiree facade to become a hardened and resolute mountain man. With each state, he encounters refreshing vistas, new faces and mishaps, whether a twisted ankle or a risky tick-bite. Though navigating the snaking paths along the Appalachian Trail doesn't quite compare with interviewing an opium drug lord in Southeast Asia or going on an unplanned cocaine bust in Colombia, Wren fills this report with humor and historical references, tying escapades of his past with adventures from his current voyage. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
After a career in journalism that took him to more than 15 countries, the author planned to mark his retirement by seeing more of a single place he'd kept meaning to visit more often: his own country. The plan was to walk from New York City to Vermont, and this entertaining memoir chronicles his adventure. We get lots of the history lessons we associate with this type of book ("here was fought the Battle of Merritt Hill") and an assortment of offbeat and interesting characters--also something we expect from the Blue Highway genre. Still, if the book doesn't break any new ground for travel memoirists, it has much to offer. Wren's prose is lively ("It was not yet noon and hotter than a July bride in a feather bed"), and his eye for detail, developed over 40 years of journalism, provides us with a wealth of pleasure. Readers who enjoy a good travel memoir will enjoy this one very much. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Roger Rosenblatt Where Christopher Wren walks is always an exotic country, even when the terrain is the Bronx, Westchester, and Vermont. He brings a first-class foreign correspondent's eye and meditative memory to the familiar, which becomes wonderfully strange. Best of all, he brings his love of adventure to the adventure of his life. What great luck that he asked us along.
Book Description
A distinguished former foreign correspondent embraces retirement by setting out alone on foot for nearly four hundred miles, and explores a side of America nearly as exotic as the locales from which he once filed. Traveling with an unwieldy pack and a keen curiosity, Christopher Wren bids farewell to the New York Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan and saunters up Broadway, through Harlem, the Bronx, and the affluent New York suburbs of Westchester and Putnam Counties. As his trek takes him into the Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and along a bucolic riverbank in New Hampshire, the strenuous challenges become as much emotional as physical. Wren loses his way in a suburban thicket of million-dollar mansions, dodges speeding motorists, seeks serenity at a convent, shivers through a rainy night among Shaker ruins, camps in a stranger's backyard, panhandles cookies and water from a good samaritan, absorbs the lore of the Appalachian and Long Trails, sweats up and down mountains, and lands in a hospital emergency room. Struggling under the weight of a fifty-pound pack, he gripes, "We might grow less addicted to stuff if everything we bought had to be carried on our backs." He hangs out with fellow wanderers named Old Rabbit, Flash, Gatorman, Stray Dog, and Buzzard, and learns gratitude from the anonymous charity of trail angels. His rite of passage into retirement, with its heat and dust and blisters galore, evokes vivid reminiscences of earlier risks taken, sometimes at gunpoint, during his years spent reporting from Russia, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. He loses track of time, waking with the sun, stopping to eat when hunger gnaws, and camping under starry skies that transform the nights of solitude. For all the self-inflicted hardship, he reports, "In fact, I felt pretty good." Wren has woven an intensely personal story that is candid and often downright hilarious. As Vermont turns from a destination into a state of mind, he concludes, "I had stumbled upon the secret of how utterly irrelevant chronological age is." This book, from the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Cat Who Covered the World, will delight not just hikers, walkers, and other lovers of the outdoors, but also anyone who contemplates retirement, wonders about foreign correspondents, or relishes a lively, off-beat adventure, even when it unfolds close to home.
About the Author
Chiristopher S. Wren, a former reporter and editor for The New York Times for twenty-eight years, has been its bureau chief in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg, and a correspondent at the United Nations. He is the author of four previous books and lives in central Vermont when not working overseas.
Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - A Homeward Adventure FROM THE PUBLISHER
A distinguished former foreign correspondent embraces retirement by setting out alone on foot for nearly four hundred miles, and explores a side of America nearly as exotic as the locales from which he once filed.
Traveling with an unwieldly pack and a keen curiosity, Christopher Wren bids farewell to the New York Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan and saunters up Broadway, through Harlem, the Bronx, and the affluent New York suburbs of Westchester and Putnam Counties. As his trek takes him into the Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and along a bucolic riverbank in New Hampshire, the strenuous challenges become as much emotional as physical.
Wren loses his way in a suburban thicket of million-dollar mansions, dodges speeding motorists, seeks serenity at a convent, shivers through a rainy night among Shaker ruins, camps in a stranger's backyard, panhandles cookies and water from a good samaritan, absorbs the lore of the Appalachian and Long Trails, sweats up and down mountains, and lands in a hospital emergency room.
Struggling under the weight of a fifty-pound pack, he gripes, "We might grow less addicted to stuff if everything we bought had to be carried on our backs."
He hangs out with fellow wanderers named Old Rabbit, Flash, Gatorman, Stray Dog, and Buzzard, and learns gratitude from the anonymous charity of trail angels. His rite of passage into retirement, with its heat and dust and blisters galore, evokes vivid reminiscences of earlier risks taken, sometimes at gunpoint, during his years spent reporting from Russia, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.
He loses trackof time, waking in the sun, stopping to eat when hunger gnaws, and camping under starry skies that transform the nights of solitude. For all the self-inflicted hardship, he reports, "In fact, I felt pretty good."
Wren has woven an intensely personal story that is candid and often dow
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Whereas retirement from a successful career is often synonymous with a blowout party and the purchase of a sports car, former New York Times reporter Wren, who served as bureau chief in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg, chose to defy the status quo and celebrate his own retirement by hiking nearly 400 miles in five weeks from Manhattan to Fairlee, Vt. Though this is a solo rite-of-passage, Wren, who became known on the trails as "Super Tortoise" for his slow but steadfast pace, encounters and befriends fellow hikers from around the world. Along the way, they swap camping stories and compare equipment, and as Wren's course meanders through fields and mountains, torrential downpours and tranquil sunsets, he learns to find comfort in the muddy, wet and open terrain. Wren departs from New York armed with the basics, including a copy of Thoreau's Walden, and slowly leaves the city's frazzled pace behind. Accompanied sporadically by old friends out for a day hike, Wren sheds his would-be retiree facade to become a hardened and resolute mountain man. With each state, he encounters refreshing vistas, new faces and mishaps, whether a twisted ankle or a risky tick-bite. Though navigating the snaking paths along the Appalachian Trail doesn't quite compare with interviewing an opium drug lord in Southeast Asia or going on an unplanned cocaine bust in Colombia, Wren fills this report with humor and historical references, tying escapades of his past with adventures from his current voyage. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Is it worth taking five days to walk a distance that can be driven in five hours? Wren (retired New York Times editor, bureau chief, author, and foreign correspondent) will convince you that the experience is definitely worth the time and effort. Upon his retirement from the New York Times, Wren decided to walk from his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City to his cabin in Vermont, some 400 miles away. He's a tough, adventurous, and determined fellow, surviving insects, bad weather, and weird trail companions while savoring the quiet of the trail, the beauty of forests and streams, and the quirks of the folks he meets along the way. This transitional hike also provides Wren with the opportunity to reflect on his adventure-filled life and to think about what lies ahead for him after retirement. Fans of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods will delight in yet another view of the pleasures of the slow, thoughtful walk through nature. Definitely recommended for large public and academic libraries with nature, travel, and autobiography collections as well as those with an emphasis on planning for retirement. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Olga B. Wise, Austin, TX Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Wielding the waspish wit he flashed in sending up the overblown aura of his chosen profession (Hacks, 1996), Wren sets off on his march into retirement by sending up himself. It's the kind of initially engaging idea that for most of us would best be abandoned overnight. But foreign correspondents are nothing if not doughty; you don't get sent to the far corners of the world with an expense account by large organizations unless commitment is consistently followed by resolve. Wren said he would do it and he does, walking out of the New York Times' mid-Manhattan office on his last day to continue on foot until he gets to the retirement home he and his wife bought in Vermont. The preparations have been elaborate (without moleskin, blisters can be terminal), the pangs of trepidation recurrent, but think of it as an opportunity for 400 footslogging miles of interior monologue. When Wren beds down alone in the woods, for example, he reflects on how much less dangerous that is than walking along a highway-or, for that matter, than the time in (name Beirut or any other famous hell-hole) when these freedom fighters (or jihadi or whatever) were out for his blood. Wren's war stories are artfully notched into the passing scene along with his grasp of local history ("Major Andre was turned over to the Continental Army near here," etc.). Characters met along the way, particularly in the Appalachian Trail section, all walk a lot faster than the author, never get lost, and seem strangely self-assured. Only when two youths bivouac nearby without ever seeming to notice him does Wren lapse into the bittersweet acknowledgment that the march into "senior anonymity" can still be redeemed by small victories,like finding Highway 22 without a compass. For the armchair hiker, a walk well worth taking.
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