"Ma, I want to be a ho-bo someday."

"In my earlier days I'd been to sea with a tall rawboned fellow from Louisiana called Big Slim Hazard, William Holmes Hazard, who was hobo by choice. As a little boy he'd seen a hobo come up to ask his mother for a piece of pie, and she had given it to him, and when the hobo went off down the road the little boy had said, "Ma, what is that fellow?" "Why. that's a ho-bo." "Ma, I want to be a ho-bo someday." "Shet your mouth, that's not for the like of the Hazards." But he never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a shortspell playing football at LSU, he did become a hobo." - Jack Kerouac "On The Road"


I read a lot of Kerouac when I was in high school and I always wanted to hop a freight train somewhere. Here in Mauritania you can hop an empty iron ore train straight out into the Sahara. Reunited with the Watkins I loaded Oscar into the ore car and made the long, cold, dusty, bumpy journey to Choum.