Influences before Rawat
Posted by: 13
Post title: Influences before Rawat
Date: 10/01/2025, 05:54:25
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
At my first Rawat event in Essen, Germany, I'd hitched there and arrived with next to no money. Checked out the venue, and I was wandering round the foyer wondering where I'd kip for the night. I fell in with a couple of other guys with the same issue. The place emptied, and there were just guards with Alsatian dogs passing through the foyer occasionally. Figured if we could find somewhere to hide, we could bed down somewhere discrete in there. But there was nowhere - except four very large desks. Each desk had a very large drawer in it, and I laughed and said we could kip in a drawer each. They were big enough. There was the problem of getting in and out, but I climbed into one and found that I could reach up to some timbers above, lift myself up and shuffle the drawer closed. And open it the same way. So that was it. Three rucksacks in one of the desks and then we occupied a drawer each. A bit of hushed giggling, and all quiet when we heard the guards with their dogs, and eventually we fell asleep and slept fine all night.

For amusement value (feel free to skip!), a list of some of the sleeping places going to events in the following years:

In the back of very many artic lorries, cars and vans.
On freight trains across America, flat beds and box cars (I used to sneak on in freight yards and hope they were going to go the right way, but at last I got caught, and the guard was very helpful and showed me the right train to get on. So after that, I just asked...)
Many times, just 50 metres back from the road, on the ground.
South of Madrid on a high, cold windswept plain, in a large cardboard box, and the following night, not much further on, in a concrete pipe.
In central Madrid, on a busy street, I found a concrete water tower on a street corner that had a platform a few metres from the ground. I climbed up there and was amused to watch the people walking the street below me, never looking up. I thought, hah, privacy in the middle of a busy street in the middle of a city! People don't look up! And I rolled onto my back to sleep and saw dozens and dozens of people gazing down at me from their high rise balconies on each side of the street.
At Malaga, in a small grass shelter I found on the beach, for a week or so.
Penniless, under bridges in Harlem, NY. And then when that became too grim, I hitched up to a tiny town called Friendship in Maine, and spent a week under a rowing boat on the beach that backed onto the forest, and told myself that the crashing about in the forest each night couldn't be a bear, because bears were diurnal, but I held tight to my rowing boat when the noise was nearby in case a bear tried to turn it over.
After a night of no sleep at all due to rampant mosquitoes in Mississippi, the following night I climbed a high steel bridge arch, and found that mosquitoes don't fly high. I took my belt off, passed it round the girder and back through the two loops on the front of my trousers and slept there, on the girder, with its many protruding rivets. Woke up very sore.
A better night seemed likely away from the mosquitoes on the roof of a fuel station in N Florida. I was in my sleeping bag quite comfortable reading a book by the light of a street light when half a dozen cop cars screeched into the car park, just like in the movies with skidding turns and squealing tyres, and all the cops jumped out and hid behind their open doors pointing their rifles at me. Sitting in my sleeping bag, naked, hands up.
After three days with no food in France and Spain, I was delighted at dawn to realise we'd slept under an orange tree. But as it got lighter, we saw it was a lemon tree, and breakfast wasn't great. They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but for that you need sugar, and a pot or a glass. A house with a kitchen, really.

So it goes. 13 times across America. Up and down each coast. Round and round Europe I don't know how many times.

So I was thinking, after these recent posts, why I did that/why it happened to me. And then I remembered Herman Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund, Journey to the East, Siddhartha, the Glass Bead Game and others.

As a kid, I'd found a small detour on the walk home from school would take me to the new library, so I got in the habit of spending an hour or two in there. Reading philosophy or psychology. Amazed that such subjects existed, and certain I could find the meaning of life in there, if I could only understand some of them. Because life definitely didn't make sense, at least so far.

Herman Hesse seemed quite a discovery to my earnest naive young mind. I took it all on board, as if the search for enlightenment was itself a meaning of life, and the answer I was informed was likely to be in the east. Hesse got a Nobel prize for literature for the Glass Bead Game, so of course this to me leant a huge authority to his stance. So in my early teens, long before I heard of Rawat, I decided to bide my time at school and home, and when I was 18, get myself a rucksack, tent and sleeping beg, and hitch to India in search of enlightenment. Money, comfort and safety were just bourgeois safety props I could learn to do without, like Goldmund.

So that was the state I was in when I was initiated soon after my 16th birthday. I entered the cult already madly earnest, diligent and focused on achieving enlightenment, content to endure whatever hardship necessary to achieve my aim.

So that's why I embraced the avoidance of work, security, routine, and went hungry and slept rough and kept moving. That was the madness I was already infected with before Rawat, and I just tweaked my world view to make him the source of my impending enlightenment.

And when I left the cult, it wasn't just Rawatism I had to delete from my perspective, but Herman Hesse too, and enlightenment, and all the concepts I'd taken on board in my earnest youth.

I was already lost and damaged and confused and deluded before my initiation, and after my initiation, I just carried it all along with me. I was a Herman Hesse flavoured premie.

Why was I so caught up with Hesse? I knew of no-one else that knew of him - though he was an acclaimed author. I guess I was so lacking in the tools I needed to understand the psychology and philosophy books, that Hesse was an easy oblique introduction to both. I had no other experience before to relate these new to me ideas, so I guess I just took them on board, unable to imagine an alternative to the ideas I was presented with. How could I? Naive and with no concept even of critical thinking. Hesse was all I had to go on. (Did that make me a Hessian??)

So this ideological asceticism that I adopted might be fairly unique to me, but surely we all went through a similar process? Whatever we encountered first that suggested some purpose to life, we'd take it on board, because as that being the first thing, we didn't yet have a second or third thing to make comparisons and judgements.

And when Rawat appeared in our lives, we each bend the ill-informed trajectory we were already on to absorb the guru, and become a kind of premie predisposed to whatever ideals and values we had already cobbled together in our naivety.

I could look back with some regret that I took on so much uncritically, but that is the current, ancient, experienced and somewhat jaded me looking back and thinking I could have questioned more, acted better. No, the me that I was then in my early teens - I didn't have the tools, the framework or the capacity to think critically, to rebel, to reject, to know myself well enough to make an informed choice. In that sense, I had no choice then I think but to act as I did.

I think we were all like this, but with other influences than mine, Hesse. We might have had the intelligence to attempt some critical thinking, but we didn't have the experiences piled up to apply our intelligence to. We had what we had.

Well, sleeping rough has been an asset after all. I got around a lot, didn't have to work much and learned to sleep even in dangerous circumstances (like storms a thousand miles from land). But the ideology behind it, the detachment and enlightenment - either nonsense or very suspect indeed. Hesse and his hippy values needed dissecting too, once Rawat was binned.

So there I think is some explanation for my eccentric behaviour, and in looking back, it seems plain that I didn't really have a choice - I used all the knowledge I had, which at that young age, wasn't enough to make a sound judgement. I think some never do acquire the experience to be able to re-evaluate things, or never have the incentive. I didn't really, till I wandered onto this forum, and that was a half-hearted bit of mild curiosity. My Mrs had just done an actual course in critical thinking at university, and I found that intriguing, and then with the cult thinking - I had something to apply new tools to.

I'm grateful the way things turned out after all, and don't really have regrets as I think circumstances then didn't offer options, and I think it unfair to judge those still lost in the cult as they simply haven't come across the tools and incentive to change course. We are where we are, probably more by luck than anything else.

I just looked it up - it turns out black bears that live near human habitation are nocturnal.

Re: Influences before Rawat
Posted by: aunt bea
Post title: Re: Influences before Rawat
Date: 10/01/2025, 07:10:05
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
That was a fun read. Especially the parts about where you slept. I don't have anything great to contribute to it. I think you are right at least for some of us that we already had started a trajectory which we bent to accommodate Rawat. Or it is an interesting way to look at it. Another explanation often expressed is that someone was in a vulnerable state and then at that moment receptive to the kind of bait that Rawatism and premies were tossing into your pond. A bit of chance there too. That is how my mother would explain her involvement. Sometimes it was just loneliness and wanting to belong to something that made you feel good about yourself. Is that all the same thing?

In my old age I have learned that free will doesn't exist, so I do my best to abstain from judgement and accept that what happens to each of us and the choices we make is all tied to our biological history. In other words luck. And it is hard to imagine that any of us are totally free of delusion. Interesting topic in itself. Sometimes it seems we replace one delusion for another.

But one thing I am curious about. Is that why you call yourself 13, because you travelled 13 times across the US?

And yes, useful information about black bears. I don't have any of those where I live, but there are wolves.

13
Posted by: 13
Post title: 13
Date: 10/01/2025, 07:27:52
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
I chose 13 as that is an unlucky number, and I wanted to swim against the tide of superstition. I'm pretty sure it was 13 times across America. Spread over three years. Taking from 3 days (3 rides) to over 2 weeks.

Certainly not saying it's the only we we get entangled in the cult - this is just a reflection on the way I got in, and looking for an explanation on why I travelled like that. I remember being surprised that people had enough money for hotels and meals and planes, when we were really supposed to give our all to Rawat.

What struck me when I was mulling it over was that I didn't really know any different at the time. I was using all I knew.

Re: Influences before Rawat
Posted by: 13
Post title: Re: Influences before Rawat
Date: 10/03/2025, 10:50:40
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
'In my old age I have learned that free will doesn't exist, so I do my best to abstain from judgement and accept that what happens to each of us and the choices we make is all tied to our biological history. In other words luck. And it is hard to imagine that any of us are totally free of delusion. Interesting topic in itself. Sometimes it seems we replace one delusion for another.'

This is often my perspective too, but sometimes I forget and give myself a hard time for making poor decisions or not trying hard enough. Probably can't help it though.

There are occasional reports of wolves around our place in France. I keep my eye out. I'm less bothered about them than I am about boars, but the first boar I met came at me and got pretty close before our dog arrived and dealt with it. And the only wolf I've encountered was in Morocco. A skinny thing. Dropped into a dry river bed I was going along. We just stood dead still for a minute or two, then it scarpered.

another question
Posted by: aunt bea
Post title: another question
Date: 10/01/2025, 10:03:19
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
One other thing I wanted to ask. Have you later in your life had anxiety dreams based on your days of roughing it and having no money? 

I don't think I was ever living on the edge to the extent you were, but I did have my own version of that and have been very risk-taking compared to most I know, where I was a stone's throw from destitution I suppose. Later on, when my life was more financially secure, I would have anxiety dreams, where whatever I was doing was no longer working and my family and I were about to end up on the street. I would wake up with a sense of panic and then as I lay in bed gradually reality would re-enter my consciousness, that I had an apartment and my own business and family and everything was fine. These would be recurring, but I don't have them anymore. Just wondering if that happened to you as well.

Re: another question
Posted by: 13
Post title: Re: another question
Date: 10/01/2025, 10:51:24
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
No, never had anxiety dreams about that. I was always on the way somewhere, so it seemed voluntary, optional. In town, I'd usually find some work and accommodation pretty quick. I once woke on Miami beach to find a man lurching above me in the darkness, swinging his arms from side to side like some cartoon ape. I couldn't move, as I'd tightened the drawstring around my face to keep out the sand that was blowing about. My arms were stuck at my sides. It was a long wait till he decided that whatever I was wasn't actually interesting. So from then on, I slept with my arms free, and a stick, belt or rock nearby, just in case. One driver put a gun on his lap and told me the sexual favours he wanted. There followed an hour long well thought out debate on free will, coercion and such. Each of us would make a little speech, then there'd be silence and a lot of thought, then the other would have a go. It was a long intense hour, but he dropped me off intact. And there was a Mexican guy with a knife who looked weirdly like Rawat. But of course, I met mostly kind people!

In the end, I realised I'd learned to manipulate some people. I could get a meal out of them. Before, such things were surprising acts of kindness I was grateful for, but I realised I had lost that innocence, and could work things around to suit me, so that was the end of hitching. I really didn't want to do that. I'm surprised it took 3 years!

And then, I wanted a place of my own. Somewhere I could properly relax, cook. I could have guests instead of perpetually being one. I headed back to London intending to find the wherewithal to buy a double decker bus, but part of that journey included my only trip on a Greyhound bus, and I overheard someone say that a 30 foot boat was big enough to cross the Atlantic. That was the first thing I learned about sailing.

So no, no panicky dreams about sleeping rough, but some to come about boats in storms, or on the rocks which happened for real and in recurring nightmares. I think the panic comes from a sense of loss of control.

Re: Influences before Rawat
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: Re: Influences before Rawat
Date: 10/01/2025, 17:56:45
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
You're a lousy businessman, 13. I would've gladly paid for the colorful, full-motion visuals you created and the exhilaration I felt from beginning to end. Hope it's all in your book that I hope you're still contemplating or working on. BTW, I've never once thought of you or any of your behavior as eccentric. As you said in so many words, it all made perfect sense from your perspective at the time... such as it was. I mean, why wouldn't you sleep in a drawer? Of course you would. It was there.

This is not my reply to your post... just letting you know I read it.

PS, We live an hour or so inland from Friendship. That bear knocked-over and bent our wrought iron bird feeder poles and we never found the bird feeders.

A diversion to Friendship, in Lakeshore's back yard.(OT)
Posted by: 13
Post title: A diversion to Friendship, in Lakeshore's back yard.(OT)
Date: 10/02/2025, 00:17:46
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
So, a diversion about Friendship, since I am remembering.

I had the money for my flight from NY back to England, but I left the money in LA, for safe-keeping, while I hitched across to NY. A word of advice - never leave money for safe-keeping with a very poor person.

So I'm in NY, sleeping each night under a road bridge in Harlem, and it was quite rainy, so I spent some days in the library, where I came across On Walden Pond, by Thoreau. That really struck a chord with me, and I thought waiting in the woods in New England might be a much pleasanter option than living under a bridge like a troll.

I hitched north with no idea which bit of New England might be a good bit, until I saw a sign for Friendship and asked the driver to drop me at that junction. Seemed like a good idea.

I spent a week there, without so much as a pumpkin to sit on, let alone a velvet cushion. The houses were boarded up, and I never saw a single person there. But there were apples everywhere, and a big wooden rowing boat at the edge of the woods by the beach. It rained much of the time, but I could prop the boat up in the day and it made a good shelter, and sometimes I had a small fire beside the boat. I lived on the bread and cheese I'd carried with me, and apples and blackberries. On the beach I found a buoy with the top rusted off. But the bottom was intact, and the pipe at the centre of it was just asking for a mast to be added to it, and I'd seen a big sheet of plastic. Another word of advice: never set sail in a vessel without a steering mechanism.

It did become hard to persuade myself that the nightly ructions were caused by a big fat badger, and that bears are definitely diurnal, so I was a bit relieved to leave the place in the end.

Back in NY, I checked Poste Restante, and still no money. Another night under the bridge, but that night some noise nearby woke me up, and I sat up very quickly and crashed by head onto the girder above me and woke in the morning with a headache and a bit of crusted blood on my face. In morning my money was at the post office, and I shot off to the airport, only to discover that the price of a ticket had gone up $5, and I didn't have it.

In the toilets, I saw myself in a mirror. I was filthy and there was a great gash right across my forehead. I looked like Frankenstein. I cleaned myself as much as I could, and for the only time in my life, tried begging for money from the travellers in the airport. I had a nice clean coat in my bag, a down filled jacket, and I tried selling that, but no-one wanted any kind of dealing with a mad Frankenstein.

So I left the airport to look for work, and walked back towards NY, asking for work from everyone I met - clean the car, rake the leaves, dig the garden - whatever. Nothing. Eventually, someone suggested I go to the race course, and clean the stables. I walked there, and arrived too late. The stables were all cleaned. Exasperated, and being at a race course for the first time in my life, I decided I might as well put a few dollars on a horse. If it won, I'd get my ticket, if it lost, I still needed to find some work. It came last.

I walked all day, and at dusk saw a supermarket in Brooklyn called the Fruit Circus. I went in and put a Snickers bar on the counter. The guy on the checkout asked, what do I want? I pointed to the Snickers bar, which seemed obvious enough. No, he said, what do you really want? Well, with the loss at the race course and some food I'd bought, and the $5 for the ticket, I said $40. Without another word, he opened the till and just handed me $40.

Yung T. Pyon was the guy's name. Korean. He was working alone in his 24/7 supermarket. He made money, but he supported his aging relatives and had a very entitled and demanding girl-friend. He was alone because he had just sacked the last of his staff, for stealing from the till, which happened with just about all the staff he hired. Behind the counter, there were bullet holes in the glass. He'd been robbed twice in the last few weeks, his till emptied. He seemed as desperate as I was. So it being too late to go back to the airport, I stuck around for the weekend to help out. I stacked a few shelves and ran the till while Yung caught up on some sleep, slumped on a chair in the store room. I slept on an empty shelf at the back of the supermarket, while Yung manned the till all night, napping slumped onto the counter.

The last fellow he had fired had left in a rage, and before he left, he'd picked up the new sound system that Yung had just installed and smashed it on the ground, somehow breaking it clean into two pieces. It looked like a clean break across the big circuit board and Yung had soldering irons for sale, so I set to work on that, and after a few hours, switched it on. We were both so delighted that it actually worked, we cranked the volume right up and danced around the aisles laughing. The grim silence in his poor shop was broken.

On Monday, Yung managed to persuade his girlfriend to look after the shop - he insisted on driving me to the airport. There, I bought my ticket, and then Yung gave me some parcels he'd prepared for some nephews I'd mentioned, and then he gave a parcel for myself and insisted I open it. It was a really beautiful silver-plated flute in a case. He was adamant that I should take it - in our long conversations over the weekend, I had mentioned some regret that I hadn't learned a musical instrument. He'd bought the flute for his girl-friend, but she didn't want it, so he was glad to be able to give it to me.

He was an amazing fellow, so generous despite his really difficult circumstances. At the back of the plane in the window seat, there was Frankenstein fiddling about with a silver flute, and I think there may have been a tear running down his face. In his last letter to me, Yung said there'd been a heat wave, so he'd bought 1000 water melons and had them stacked in the car park. He'd sold quite a few, but then the rain came, and the melons quickly turned into a rotting pile, and he was looking for someone to come and take the mess away, and I was sorry I couldn't be there with a shovel.

Re: A diversion to Friendship, in Lakeshore's back yard.(OT)
Posted by: lesley
Post title: Re: A diversion to Friendship, in Lakeshore's back yard.(OT)
Date: 10/02/2025, 06:08:46
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
thanks 13, really good writing and great stories.  it's exceptional and it's got me wondering, where do you think you were heading, what do you think you'd have done if you hadn't met up with the cult.

my mini version of extreme - to stop eating anything but rice and water for months, I think it would have ended up, as I introduced new foods, one vegetable at a time, giving me a very good grounding for experimenting as a cook.

Without being disturbed from my trajectory I think I might have ended up with a nice little place in the South Wales countryside, making blackberry jam and selling it in clay pots I made.

What else might have happened
Posted by: 13
Post title: What else might have happened
Date: 10/02/2025, 13:02:36
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
What else would I have done? Probably fallen into a different cult. I was ripe for it.

Plan A, from a young age, was the journey to the east. Plan B developed from the age of 16 - go to medical school. Plan A - I was beginning to realise was already becoming a bit passe, and since I'd already found the guru everyone was looking for, going to India seemed a bit superfluous. The idea of finding out how people worked and helping people was growing on me. I was in the top school in town, in the top stream and I was persistently top of the class in science and maths. I had the grades. It should have been mine for the asking, but all 5 universities I applied to turned me down. Not even a conditional offer. I learned that the headmaster's recommendation counted for a lot and unfortunately, we got a new headmaster the day after I got the big K, and his very first job was to cane me for truanting to go to the K session. That was the start of a two year war between us. So I think, indirectly, being in the cult lead to my rejection from medical school. Leaving me with plan A.

My son recently told me more of his school career which I was unaware of, and he was thrown out just a couple of weeks before his final exams. It sounded a pretty familiar story. We compared notes and were very amused we'd got up to many of the same tricks. So no university for him, and off he went. First stop, outer Mongolia, then years of travelling in remote places. And now, he's a blooming doctor. He knows I'm proud of him, but I'm prouder of him than I dare say.

Re: Influences before Rawat to go
Posted by: lakeshore
Post title: Re: Influences before Rawat to go
Date: 10/02/2025, 20:22:23
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
"So that's why I embraced the avoidance of work, security, routine and went hungry and slept rough and kept moving. That was the madness I was already infected with before Rawat, and I just tweaked my world view to make him the source of my impending enlightenment."

Of course! A crystal-clear and easily understandable explanation for such an astonishing and extraordinary journey. I would've opened with that and struggled to explain how I got there, whereas you laid it all out first and left no room for any misunderstanding when you ended with it. What brilliant writing... your post and all your replies in this thread. And such a brilliant portrait that, together with all your other funny, harrowing and endearingly audacious adventures, allow me to vicariously tag along and cheer you on. The antithesis of my "a place for everything and everything in its place" need for routine, stability and control over my environment. Like my imprisoned alter ego let lose. My fantasies, inclinations and suppressed impulses come to life. I feel indebted.

I'm not sure it was madness to have the wherewithal to go with all you had to go on at the time and in each moment. There's really so much to reply to... I'm especially intrigued by your two-year back and forth with that headmaster who beat you with a cane. I have a hunch that, in passively clever ways, he got as good as he gave.

After letting it sink in, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the common denominator in all these stories is, in large part, your endearing character that seemed to get you out of a lot of jams. And yet you were self-aware enough to step back from using or relying on it to manipulate others to get what you needed. Clearly, there's a fine gentleman and a person of integrity behind all those audacious scenarios... too numerous to list. (I'm smiling and shaking my head again even as I write this. ) Not to mention uncanny self-sufficiency!

A few more thoughts:

• When I was a kid, we called people like you hobos! The mysterious and spooky tell-tale signs of abandoned encampments in the woods down by the railroad tracks.

• Who knew loud, ugly, spewing tractor-trailer trucks are also called artic lorries?

• "I was already lost and damaged and confused and deluded before my initiation, and after my initiation, I just carried it all along with me."

Apparently, after reading Gregg's post in his new thread above, so was Prem. It's just that when he finally woke-up, if he ever did, instead of getting out from under his damage, confusion and delusion, he gripped it harder and repackaged it with a lot of enticing words to make himself and others feel better about it.

More to your point, perhaps we all brought our version that we carried along after initiation. The invaluable silver platinum lining is that it served as a catalyst to fully clean house to the best of our ability and you and others here were instrumental in helping me try and continue to try to do that. Not saying I'm no longer deceived by false or dubious "knowings," but still...

• "I'm grateful the way things turned out after all, and don't really have regrets as I think circumstances then didn't offer options, and I think it unfair to judge those still lost in the cult as they simply haven't come across the tools and incentive to change course. We are where we are, probably more by luck than anything else."

Aside from being so well said, what a beautiful way to end, especially "circumstances then didn't offer options"... and the part about it not being fair to judge. Perhaps the reason I have no regrets is because, as I've often said here and to myself, given the same circumstances and what I felt, what I thought I knew and what I yearned for at the time, I wouldn't have done anything differently. Put another way, we played the hands we were dealt as best we could, "best" being the key word because we were all good people of kindness and integrity.

Rawat not so much... spilling water for others to lap-up and so on in even more damaging, demeaning and abusive ways. (As Valerio said in the Team Trainings, "That's not a judgement, it's an observation of fact.")

I really do hope you find a way to compile it all in a memoir. Published or not, it's what great books, movies and vicarious thrills are made of. There's more than a few scenes I can't wait to see on the big screen. Yung T. Pyon... "At the back of the plane in the window seat, there was Frankenstein fiddling about with a silver flute, and I think there may have been a tear running down his face." 

And I'm barely scratching the surface.


Re: Influences before Rawat to go
Posted by: 13
Post title: Re: Influences before Rawat to go
Date: 10/03/2025, 11:02:08
Original URL: Click here (However, the link may be stale.)
Thank you for your kind responses each of you.

I have a cold and a mild fever, and these thoughts have been rattling round in my head when I should have been asleep. I wondered whether to post such a long screed, but figured, well, you're adults and you can ignore it or stop reading whenever you like.

I've been dwelling on the fact that those kinds of events were a part of their time, maybe even cult involvement in that way. Cos these days, there'd never be a need to send cash in the post, go and find a call box with the correct change and try to time it right for when someone might be next to the phone tethered to the wall. No need to actually go to an airport to find the price of flight and so on. 

I'm 68. What I wrote is in some part a historical memoire. Well, kids, it was before the internet. Before texts. Before instant transfers at the bank. And before you could very easily do some research about an individual making outlandish claims. Yeah, we did have wheels, and trucks... oh never mind.