Whether you first encountered Rick Steves via his popular line of guidebooks or his genial series of PBS travel shows, you probably already recognize him as the Northwest’s preeminent authority on world travel.

This month, he is publishing a new book — one that documents his very first major trip, a journey that launched his lifelong passion for travel as a catalyst for personal and political change.

For Steves, the pandemic’s isolation was emotionally challenging. So he dug into his archives, which unearthed his very first handwritten, hard-bound travel journal. He wrote it in 1978 when, at 23, he put his piano teaching practice on pause to travel on the “hippie trail,” taking a 3,000-mile journey from Istanbul to Kathmandu, Nepal, through areas that had become popular with backpackers and dropouts in the 1960s and ’70s.

Steves’ journals have now been published in a gorgeous book, “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer,” featuring full-color photographs, a foldout map and reproductions of journal pages.

The trip itself served as the origin story of the larger-than-life figure that Steves has become: A man who greets both the joys and frustrations of travel with enthusiasm, and who’s not afraid to advocate for travel as a political act.

He sees travel as an essential part of overcoming creeping insularity.

“When you travel thoughtfully and then you step into the voting booth, you don’t just vote for what’s good for you in the short term,” Steves said over Zoom from his Edmonds home. “You care about the environment, you care about the future, you care about poor people, you care about people south of the border. And you vote for what’s right, not what’s selfish.”

Upon the foundation of his first guidebook, published in 1980, he has built Rick Steves’ Europe into a massive operation that now takes more than 30,000 travelers on tours throughout Europe every year.

While political trends in the U.S. have moved toward isolationism, Steves said he hasn’t seen any indication that national politics are harming his company. Business returned to prepandemic rates in 2023 and exceeded them last year, Steves said.

And on his tours, he’s going to nudge the travelers he guides to think critically and be curious.

“The standard wisdom for a tour company among the guides is, ‘Don’t talk politics, don’t talk religion and don’t talk soccer. It just makes people fight.’ I say, ‘Talk religion, talk politics, talk soccer!’ But do it in a respectful way.”

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“He’s really not afraid to talk about public nudity in Europe or marijuana laws, or (of) telling his audience that high taxes aren’t necessarily an awful thing,” she said.

McClanahan watched Steves’ shows growing up, and beyond her appreciation for him as “this friendly, folksy guy on PBS,” she has been “really struck by the fact that he wasn’t afraid to be political and encourage his audience in new directions that might be uncomfortable for them.”

Locally, Steves helped end pot prohibition in Washington state in 2012, and he has “put a lot of money and time into helping stop the prohibition against marijuana in our country” over the years.

“I’m not pro-marijuana,” Steves said. “I’m pro-civil liberties, and I’m antiprohibition, and I’m anti-mass incarceration. I can smoke marijuana with impunity as a privileged white guy, but for a person of color or a poor person, it could really be devastating if they’re caught with a joint in their pocket.”

Though he’s thoughtful about his work, he doesn’t spend a lot of time on recriminations and regrets. When asked if he ever considered his youthful travels through some of the poorest places in the world to be an act of extractive colonialism, he paused.

“It never occurred to me to think of it as exploitative,” he said before admitting, “I suppose somebody could think of it that way.”

“I wanted to explore the world because I wanted to give the palette that I would paint my life with more colors,” Steves said, “and to wallop my ethnocentricity.”

Walloping ethnocentricity has become his life’s work. Starting with the first guidebook, Steves has iterated and expanded his publishing business to encompass dozens of guidebooks and language phrase books. During that time, Rick Steves’ Europe has flourished to a staff of 106 workers in Edmonds (including the company’s namesake) and an additional 97 contracted tour guides in Europe.

Speaking about his latest book, Steves said “this was the last year the hippie trail could be done.” Shortly after his journey, the Ayatollah Khomeini closed Iran’s borders. Less than a year later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, plunging the nation into decades of wars.

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“On the Hippie Trail” doesn’t shy away from the whole experience of travel. In addition to the exhilaration of smoking cannabis for the first time and visiting cities and towns that couldn’t be any further from his hometown, the younger Steves also recounts, in vivid language, every stomach virus and attempted mugging along the way.

He is happy to reread passages from when he traveled, miserable and nauseous, on a vomit-encrusted bus seat.

“That’s what carbonates the experience,” he said. “It gets you out of your comfort zone.”

He hopes the warts-and-all narrative will help readers to “see culture shock as a constructive thing — not something you want to avoid, but something that you want to learn from.”

Steves divides travel into two types — there’s “la-la land travel and reality travel.” He described la-la land travel as Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla., as gorgeous resorts that have been scrubbed clean of any local flavor.

He has enjoyed spending time in those resorts. But even while he’s sunning on white-sand beaches, he remains “aware that if you walk six blocks inland and have dinner with somebody who’s serving all of these people who are getting their beach time, you’ll learn much more about the realities of this planet.”

At the Rick Steves’ Europe office in downtown Edmonds, staffers “joke that our mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando,” Steves said. “I don’t think Orlando is bad, but for many people that’s all there is.”

“You could try Portugal,” he suggests to those la-la land travelers. “It’s not going to bite you, and it might even open the door to a global citizenship.”

Last year, with trademark outspokenness, Steves announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer .

“I’ve been public about this because I think it’s important for people just to be mindful of the fact that this is not uncommon,” he said, hoping to use his celebrity as a “public service” to start conversations about cancer awareness.

It worked. After he gave a round of interviews about his diagnosis, “all of a sudden people I know very well admitted to me that they’ve had prostate cancer, and I didn’t even know they had it.

“Now my doctor says I’m essentially cancer-free,” he said, after surgery and multiple blood tests. “I’m really thankful for that and now I’m just feeling great.”

This year, Steves will turn 70, and while he still enjoys traveling and connecting people to the world, he’s starting to think about his legacy. For one thing, he’s embarked on a careerwide content review.

“I’m thinking about ways to make sure that all the content that we’ve produced over the years has legs, that it lasts,” he said, meaning “looking at all my TV shows and noting which ones are relatively timeless and which ones are dated. If it’s dated, we update.”

As for the guidebooks and tours, “I’ve got a hundred wonderful colleagues and employees at Rick Steves’ Europe, and I’m convinced that I could retire or die right now and the company would be fine.”

His goal this year is to “figure out a smart way to, over time, ensure that the company is employee-owned,” Steves continued. “We’re working together now so that when I’m no longer as engaged as I am now, they will still be doing the same work.”