About Johnny Anderson

Johnny Anderson was born in a cement jungle in the south eastern part of the U.K. Raised in one of the older tenant houses that was built around the early part of the twentieth century, the building held more than old plaster, bricks and mortar. Entities from a time long gone lingered within its walls and were playmates of Johnny’s for the first few years of his life.

Raised as an only child with parents who’d separated only a few years after marriage, Johnny’s reality was divided by two very different worlds. On one hand you had a life which was pretty mundane while attending school and living with his mom during the week. Yet on the other came the weekends where kids from a whole neighborhood would come out to play. Johnny’s father would take as many children as he could and squeeze them into his old compact car. Then he'd drive the youngsters to parks and other places of leisure, where he’d interact with them and play games.

This difference in upbringing, set the foundation for a personality that was patient, reserved, understanding yet balanced, which was needed years later for the thousands of miles that Johnny hitchhiked around the earth.

Leaving the U.K. at the age of twenty, Johnny spent the majority of the next 10 years hitchhiking. The ground that he covered ranged from a few small countries in Europe to the expanses of Canada, Oz and the U.S. But it wasn’t the miles under his belt that gave him the drive to put the blue ink onto paper and compile this tale.

The reason why he spent two decades in doing just that; was the simple fact that in all the years that he was on the road, he’d left Mother England, knowing hardly anyone. Even his first residence in Holland ended up being a complete disaster when he got there.

So with the above in mind, never once while hitchhiking did Johnny ever ask to stay at someone’s home or hint that he was homeless and was, for almost a decade while he was on the road.

Yet in all those years of hitchhiking he never once paid to stay in or had the luxury of sleeping in a hotel or a motel. Aside the handful of times that he paid to stay at a backpackers in Australia and one evening at a youth hostel in Germany; this wandering soul slept rough just eight times in all those years. Nearly all of his accommodation came from the very people who picked him up hitchhiking. That’s a remarkable triumph unto itself! This is a very unique story and one that had to be told.