The longest continous footpath in the world, the Appalachian Trail stretches along the East Coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine, through some of the most arresting and celebrated landscapes in America-the Smoky Mounyains, Shenandoah National Park, the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and the Great North Woods of Maine. At the age of forty-four, in the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Her Nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike through the vast tangled woods which have been frightening sensible people for three hundred years. Ahead lay alomst 2,200 miles of remote hundred years, poisonous plants, disease-bearing ticks, the occasional chuckling murderer and-perhaps most alarming of all-people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack. Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Flies, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition-not to die outdoors. Reared in the comice tradition of Twain, Thurbe and Perelman, Bill Bryson used his many years in Britain to soak up a peculiarly English sense of irony. The result is a view of the world that is uniquely, hilariously, his own.