“He who starts on a ride of two or three thousand miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else; but above all he must and will feel a fool. It is like sitting down to read The Faërie Queene right through, only worse. Not yet broken in to the stately unhurrying tempo of the caravans, not yet absorbed in the life of the road, he finds, in the contrast between the slowness of the first short stage and the hugeness of the distances before him, something keenly ridiculous. His imagination and his sense of drama reject so little a beginning to so great an enterprise. His mind is full of the immensity of his ambitions; his body, sitting on a horse, makes the first move towards their fulfilment at a pace which is often exceeded by old ladies in bath chairs. He feels a fool.”