Ninety years ago, Evelyn Waugh wrote a travel book called Remote People. You couldn't do that today. Those remote people are now your Facebook friends. But Al Regnery has found a way to write a travel book about remote places that will never be mentioned in the New York Timestravel section. That's because he visited ancient Christian sites in Europe and the Middle East and wrote about them in a wonderful new book, Unlikely Pilgrim (Beaufort Books, 2019).
Some of the places he visited will be generally familiar to us, but even there, he takes us to places the guidebooks will have missed — the small abbey in France, the forgotten church in Romania. Some places, like pre-Sept. 11 Syria, are still more foreign still and tragically will never be seen again.
It's also a hiker's book, about what it's like to walk 25 miles a day with a pack on your back, dealing with shin splints and not knowing where you'll sleep that evening. Sometimes, it would be in a humble pension, where you'd get the equivalent of a four-star dinner; sometimes it would be an outpost of the Empire, like the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, where T.E. Lawrence and Churchill stayed and where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express.
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