Relish In the Tread is a celebration of life, an opportunity to not only enjoy but savor, taste, experience one man's journey across Europe. It's the relish that gets stuck in the tread of a traveler's boot, but it is also the chance to fully appreciate the journey a traveler's boot treads endure over time. While he followed ancient pilgrimage trails as a hiker would, all the way across Europe, it was for culture and for himself, he hiked many months. Our world has become one big village to some degree, and people are moving all over the place and fast. Hiking slowly across countries gave us an opportunity to truly connect and understand the people around us, and the culture they grew up in. It gave us the opportunity to escape entitlement. Consumption has been promoted by capitalism for decades, its what keeps the gears spinning and the money machine printing and every action we make has become an extension of marketing. Relish In the Tread is a real fiction of what travel encompasses from one man's epic expedition along the Camino de Santiago and then all the Way from Rome to Istanbul. Freddi, the main character faces every kind of difficulty and through determination pushes himself through them to carry on walking. It's a book of survival as much as a celebration, but also filled with lessons of history from European empires old and new and their cultural significance to food, language and general anthropology. And like every journey into the world, the main character encounters people along the Way, some of them women who'd inspire him to love, even for a moment. for as a vagabond, or backpacking nomad, that is all Freddi had. He had moments to feel the faces of a few chance encounters to relish the time they had together, to rid himself of the ongoing loneliness that came from months of walking, without a friend around, without a chance to engage with someone on a regular basis. Relish In the Tread seizes the day. Every chapter has a fragrance of the country the main character walks through, but also a point of philosophy on the road, that authors like Jack Kerouac suggested back in the 40's and 50's. Freddi decided to devote himself to the Way, and with nothing more than a tent, cooking gear, clothes, a couple plastic bottles of water and ambition. His curiosity would push him 3000 kilometers across Europe. And his determination would keep him going despite the water poisoning or injuries or conflicts with ignorant country folk. Relish In the Tread is a story of honesty and truth and a chance for any reader to understand what it takes, what it really takes to live as a traveler. His rebellion by nature drew him to minimalism, his lack of a working visa drew him to work illegally wherever he went, his connection to the road forced him to live.
