Confessions of a Middle-Aged Backpacker

A Solo Travel Memoir

By: Chris Gattanella

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

An exciting, hilarious, and thoughtful travel memoir about one man's adventurous two and a half years on the road, backpacking through 40+ countries on a shoestring budget.

From the back cover:

Until his midlife crisis arrived, Chris Gattanella always played it safe. He spent two decades sinking into a nice cozy life and career in Los Angeles.

Now in his forties and newly single, he suddenly feels unfulfilled and bored. Is it because he never ventured out to see the world? Impulsively, Chris burns years of saved vacation time on a six-week “test run” through Europe to see if he enjoys being a wandering backpacker. Thrilled with his adventure, he then sells his condo and quits his job.

But to make long-term travel on the road feasible, Chris will have to live frugally. Finding himself amongst mostly young people in hostels, he will try to blend in with the crowd. He’ll survive multiple monkey attacks, a boat sinking, altitude sickness, a deranged sea captain, and many other bizarre encounters with people, animals, and transportation on seven continents. Two and a half years and 40+ countries later he'll have a multitude of ridiculous anecdotes ... and he'll be a little closer to understanding the meaning of life.

**** A must-read for those interested in solo travel, adventure books, biographies, autobiographies, travel humor, travel writing, and true stories! ****

Definitely worth a listen!

I love travel books, so I took a chance on this book despite the lack of thousands of reviews I am used to seeing in Audible. I am so glad that I did! The author has written a very entertaining account of his world travels. I have always been intrigued by the backpacking travelers I have encountered when vacationing with my family in a few slightly “off the beaten path” destinations in Central America and the Caribbean. If you have ever contemplated ditching the 9to5 work grind and seeing the world as a vagabond traveler, then this book is for you. It might convince you to hit the road and attempt to see the many awe inspiring destinations of the world on a limited budget, or it might be a cautionary tale for anyone with an overly romanticized fantasy of what the backpacker lifestyle might look like. I’m content to listen to the author’s adventures. I doubt that I will ever step foot in Zambia or Uruguay. But there are a few places I learned more about from this book, and I’m even more excited to plan those trips after hearing the author’s glowing descriptions of bucket list destinations like New Zealand and the Galapagos.

I can’t write this review without a mention of the AI narrator. This was my first AI narrated Audible book that I have listened to. The narrator’s voice was fine and easy to listen to. I would say that, based on my experience listening to this book, AI is 95% there in terms of normal speech and intonation. It’s a far cry better than the robotic speech from 5 or 10 years ago. But the mispronunciations of place names, along with the odd phrasing when certain sentences were read as a question?, occasionally took me out of the story. It certainly wasn’t enough of a distraction to negatively impact my enjoyment of this book. But I did miss the human touch that I am accustomed to when listening to an audio book. I’m sure that a really good reader could have enhanced this book. Still, I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes travel adventures.

AI reader

Okay story. the AI reader was not a great idea - frequently mispronounced words (and not always in the same way) and didn't do as good a job with tone/inflection/different voices as most human readers.

Adventure of a lifetime

I did like most of the authors experiences. The only thing I know is that I don’t know if the voice was AI, but there were some pretty big mispronunciations of Place names.

Awesome

Awesome book I loved it great story and writing wish it didn’t end kept getting better

Another one ruined by AI reader

I think there's an adventure or story somewhere in this book. However, the AI reader made it an unbearable listen. I tried for several hours...I just can't. AI is literally ruining Audible one book at a time.