I am easily intimidated by men in uniforms, especially these two big, green-suited giants who pulled back the door on my train compartment and held out their hands, waiting for me to dig my passport out of my backpack. They were not smiling. To add to the drama, it was the middle of the night, so my groggy self couldn't find the bloody blue book that would tell them I was who I am. I'm always like this at border crossings. I get so nervous I convince myself that I am truly guilty of some crime that even I didn't know I had committed. This nervousness is particularly pronounced when I, a child of the land of liberty and freedom for all, cross behind the dreaded Iron Curtain. Now, heading into Tito's Yugoslavia, I had the same dry-mouth, flip-of-the-stomach fear that I had felt at Checkpoint Charlie two years before, when I was searched for contraband pfennigs on the way back from the ballet in East Berlin. So begins the stories of a naive, language-challenged twenty-something young woman, as she travelled through Yugoslavia (former), France, Spain, Morocco and Greece in the early 1970s. These stories aren't the usual backpacking, dope-smoking adventures that so many young people were having at the time but rather day-to-day encounters with cranky landladies, fish mongers, thorny cherry trees, on-the-floor bread making, serenading potato sellers, marauding centaurs and so much more. The stories in Mediterranean Journey are loosely based on the real adventures of the author who immersed herself in the language, culture and food of each country as she searched for home."