Featured image: Rick Steves’ need book shares his coming-of-age trip across Asia / Photo from Rick Steves
Rick Steves shares how this coming-of-age trip inspired a teaching mission
We’re thrilled to welcome beloved travel expert Rick Steves to a special JourneyWoman webinar on April 15, 2025. Rick will share his newest book, “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer” and how this coming-of-age trip inspired a teaching mission to inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.
In January 2024, on the occasion of JourneyWoman’s 30th anniversary, JourneyWoman CEO Carolyn Ray spoke with Steves about the evolution of women’s solo travel, low season travel and ways that we can all be more thoughtful tourists.
“The world would be a better place if we all travelled,” Steves says. “Travelling lets the world know each other. If we want a safer, more stable world, we’ve got to get out there and get to know the other 96% of humanity – especially Americans. That’s a beautiful, powerful thing.”
About “On the the Hippie Trail”
In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year-old Rick Steves made the trek and documented his experiences along the way: leaping off a moving train in Yugoslavia, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for his first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, making the scene on Freak Street in Kathmandu, and more.
That 60,000-word journal is now Rick’s newest book, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer — and he is celebrating its publication with a new talk that illustrates how this coming-of-age trip inspired his teaching mission to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando: to travel smartly by creating an efficient itinerary, eating and sleeping well, avoiding crowds, and packing light…to travel experientially, with the philosophy that the more understanding you bring to your sightseeing, the more you’ll get out of it, and meeting people carbonates your experience…and to “travel as a political act” by broadening their perspectives and coming home with the greatest of all souvenirs: a passion for building not walls, but bridges.
Webinar details: On the Hippie Trail with Rick Steves
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
When: 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm EST (check local time zones here)
Where: Zoom! Sign up below for the link. The session will be recorded and shared on our YouTube channel for those who can’t join us. As always, participants are welcome to share their experiences and ask questions.
These webinars are offered to all women at no charge, but we are asking for your support to pay our hosts and team who help produce these. Please consider supporting our efforts to help women travel safely and well here.
Rick in Europe/ Credit Rick Steves
About Rick Steves
Rick Steves is a popular public television host, a best-selling guidebook author, and an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel. But above all else, Rick considers himself a teacher. He taught his first travel class at his college campus in the mid-1970s — and now, more than 40 years later, he still measures his success not by dollars earned, but by trips impacted.
Rick is the founder and owner of Rick Steves’ Europe, a travel business with a small-group tour program that brings more than 30,000 people to Europe annually. Each year, the company contributes to a portfolio of climate-smart nonprofits, essentially paying a self-imposed carbon tax. He also supports and works closely with many advocacy groups and has been instrumental in the legalization of marijuana in states across the country.
Rick spends about four months a year in Europe, researching guidebooks, fine-tuning his tour program, filming his TV show, and making new discoveries for travelers. To recharge, he plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade mountains, and spends time with his son Andy and daughter Jackie. He lives and works in his hometown of Edmonds, Washington, where his office window overlooks his old junior high school.
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