Imagine picking up your groceries at your local supermarket and suddenly a young man approaches you. His shirt is sweat-soaked, he is in need of a shave, and his clothes look more than a little dirty. For a moment, you consider ducking into the frozen foods aisle, but before you can make a decision, he greets you with a large smile plastered to his face and asks you if there is a good restaurant in the area. Curiosity gets the better of you and you begin to chat. What’s he doing with nothing more than a small backpack in this part of the world? He’s traveling through the continent. And then, quite casually, he adds that he has nowhere to stay for the night. You know what he’s really asking, so you give the man in front of you a piercing look; he seems okay, his smile is genuine, his story seems sound. Would you invite a complete stranger into your home?

Ryan Johns discovered that almost every night the answer was yes.

When Johns, fresh out of Columbia, announced that he was going to run through Europe, he was met with more than a little incredulity. And when he announced he was going to do it without paying for lodging, his parents really started to worry. Ryan graduated from Columbia University in the spring of 2009. An architecture major and a runner, he decided to use his “free transportation,” as he called it, to good use.

“I’ve always wanted to go see all the art and see all those things we [studied] in school,” explained Johns. “So I said okay, if I go after school, to Europe—which pretty much everyone does—how can I make this trip my own?”

Trains were not exciting enough. Instead, Johns began his journey in Amsterdam and ran—all the way to Athens. For 131 days he would wake up in a new town, jog thirty-five kilometers or more to the next town, and then the next morning do it all over again. He covered 4,090 kilometers. He braved climate changes, language barriers, and cultural differences all on foot.

But still, that wasn’t enough. Johns decided hostels were too boring, and he wanted to keep it cheap. Thus he created a rule for his trip: for lodgings, Johns would rely solely on the hospitality of strangers. And though he expected to spend a lot of nights outdoors, Johns decided that this was the best way to really meet the locals. Each evening after reaching a new town, Johns would attempt to get an invitation to sleep in someone’s home. And if he didn’t? Well, then he would find a park bench.

To John’s great surprise that was almost never necessary. In the first 80 days of his trip, he did not sleep outside once, “Except for a night in the middle of the Black Forest where there was no one for me to ask.”

It did take some trial and error to really work out his tactic for asking strangers for a place to sleep. After some failed strategies, including attempts at chatting people up on their runs, Johns realized that the best policy was honesty. He would approach a person with a question at a café or introduce himself to someone interesting at a bar, and then, gradually, he would tell his story.

Without a travel companion, Johns relied entirely on people he met along the way for company, but sometimes even that was not an option.

“There were times when I would spend two hours climbing a mountain to get to a road on the other side and I would get there and the road wouldn’t be there. And I’d have to turn around and say, I can’t just call someone to come and pick me up. I’m in the middle of a mountain—I don’t have anyone to call,” said Johns. “In a way it’s the most alone I’ve ever been in my life, but in a way it’s the most social I’ve ever been…Almost in every town I’d make some sort of friends.”

There was also the language barrier. Johns arrived in Europe with some stagnant high school French, a few semesters of Italian and one semester of German. The first country he arrived in, however, was the Netherlands, so there he resorted to speaking a mixture of English and German, which, to him, sounded like Dutch. As he traveled through Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and eventually Greece, he was shocked to discover that, although he had hated foreign language classes in school, and although he knew no more than their very basics, he was able to pick them up quite quickly when he had to.

For example, one month into Italy, Johns found himself doing a live radio interview. “They pour me a glass of water, I sit down, they flip on the 'on air' light, and this woman starts speaking to me really fast in Italian, and I kind of had to brace myself and…slowly by slowly the words came out.” An employee of the station ended up offering him a place for the night.

But there was even more to the trip than running, chatting up locals, and learning foreign languages. Johns had come to Europe to see the art and architecture that he had studied at Columbia. He spoke to Italians about literature he had read in Lit Hum that they, likewise, had been required to read in school. He saw famous architecture, but he knew more than just the fact that it was famous. He knew who built it, why it was built, what is was made of, and when it was made.

At the end of the road, John realized that he had reached his greatest expectations; he had made a journey truly his own. “When people go on vacation, they don’t really think about, ‘well, this is what I like to do, this is what I want to see.’ And they should.”