I think the first stamp is when I left the U.K. on August 25th, 1987 but I’m not sure. It fits in with my departure date, so probably is. There weren’t many stamps after that, until I got to Greece at the end of the continental Europe journey just over a month later.
Keeping a Diary to Write like Kerouac
I kept a diary on loose paper at first, before buying exercise books along the way. I posted them home. Here’s the first day and its eve, when I wrote of listening to Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction (30th anniversary tomorrow!) before leaving:
Here’s an exercise book from later in the trip, where I reference Ozzy (Diary of a Madman), Anthrax (NFL: Nice F***ing Life) and Lynyrd Skynyrd/Blues Brothers (Sweet Home Alabama or Chicago) and proclaim my ambitions to write a Kerouac On The Road (updated to the highest musical level by Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction, following other street living songwriters such as AC/DC, Van Halen, Rose Tattoo and Motley Crue) style memoir (I’ve Lived It So You Can Read It).
My first travel memoir, The Guns N’ Roses Worker-Traveller, was published by Chipmunka, and I have since written several more books, available on Amazon.