“I looked at retirement and I was afraid. I needed to put distance between my old life and whatever lay in the future.”
George Critchlow is the first to admit he is not a mechanic. In high school, his friends used to tease him by making up fake car parts like “Johnson rods” just to see if he would nod along. Yet, after fourteen-thousand days of driving the exact same route to the law school where he taught, he knew he had to do something radical to shake himself awake.
He wrote Travels With Vamper because he wanted to capture the exact moment a human being transitions from who they were to who they are becoming. He set out to share the raw, unvarnished reality of a graybeard navigating a world that often feels like it belongs exclusively to the young.
This book is deeply infused with his decades spent as a trial lawyer, his memories of civil rights tension in Selma, a year spent teaching law in post-communist Transylvania, and the quiet wisdom of a Nez Perce elder he met on a riverbank decades ago. He wrote this story for the seekers, the thinkers, and anyone currently wrestling with what it means to live an authentic, meaningful life.
