Constrained by the pleasant chains of a job he enjoyed and a family he loves, John Davison prepared himself for his big break. With the experience he'd built up from backpacking in the UK, he seized the moment and set off to recreate the journey undertaken by Robert Louis Stevenson across the Cevennes region of France in 1878. Meeting kind, generous people (interspersed with the occasional idiot whom even a saint would want to throttle), battling bad weather and equipment failure, never losing his sense of the absurd, John heads through the hills towards journey's end: the golden city down on the plain.