Douglas Jewell used to be the Herald’s sports editor.

He used to be a PGA caddie.

He used to be a dairy farmer.

He used to be a play-by-play announcer.

To save time and space, let me skip his other professions and pastimes and suggest you just read his recently published book, Roadtrip: A Baby Boomer’s Misadventures in Hitchhiking and Other Unconventional Travel.

The book is a catalog of his three hitchhiking trips to various points in the U.S. taken over a period of almost 20 years. The first trip, begun in 1976 at age 25 lasted two months—and he was not alone.

“My wife at the time, and our dog, took off north from southern California and we ended up in Oregon,” Jewell said in a recent telephone interview. “I just knew that we would stop wherever destiny took us.”

It took them to the rather curiously-named “Rattlesnake Ranch,” where they settled for the next several months. Eventually, Jewell established himself as a dairy farmer and lived the next two-and-a-half years dutifully milking cows.

But that was just another stint of on-the-job training.

“I had this yearning to live as many lifetimes as I could in one life,” he said.

Jewell was to squeeze many of those lives into that trip, and two more hitchhiking sojourns, spread over the next 18 years, with a second trip in 1989, and the third (and he vows the last) in 1994.

“People ask me why I did it (the 1994 trip),” he said, “and I get them off my back by simply stating, ‘mid-life crisis.’”

But in actuality, Jewell always seemed get disappointed with people when he would settle into a profession or more traditional lifestyle.

“In 1994 I owned a newspaper—the Sports Tribune,” he said. “But I closed the paper; I had had enough of people. I sat on the Delaware Bay in the Villas one day and thought about it. Then I looked west. That was it!”

So, firmly ensconced in middle age, he began an 8,000-mile trip across the country.

“The ground is a lot harder at age 44 than it is at 25,” he said.

During that trip, he got trapped in a box canyon, and broke four ribs in a land slide.”

“I came back with my body broken, but my spirit refreshed,” he admitted.

In between his first and second adventure, he hitched—at age 38—from Cape May to North Carolina, where he caught a sailboat to the Virgin Islands and worked as a foreman on a construction crew for eight months.

“I made some money on that trip,” he said. “I kept about $1,200 in a sock.”

Throughout these trips, Jewell kept a journal—quite a few journals.

“I filled about six notebooks,” he said. “I would write every day. I had to learn to write by the side of the road. Whenever I got a ride, I would ask questions, then write about that ride as soon as I got out.”

Fourteen years after closing that sixth notebook, Jewell opened them all and began to chronicle the strange expeditions that had given so much meaning to his life. The result: Roadtrip.

The book is a 200-page triptych of a life (or many lives lived during one lifetime) spent variously on the road, on a farm, on a sailboat, on an island, and, oh yes…trapped in a boxed canyon.

“When you hitchhike,” Jewell cautioned, “your senses are heightened. You’re carefree, but with an asterisk. You never know who is going to pick you up, so you have to be able to judge people.

“There was an occasional concern, but what I found out is that most Americans are great people. Some would take me to their home; others would take me to a bar, or a restaurant…one even brought me home to swim in his pool. Those I met restored my faith in people.”

Jewell and his present wife, Joyce, will be taking another trip—in about four years he estimates.

“We’ll be driving back out west,” he said. “We’ll stay in motels along the way.”

At the age of 20, Jewell wrote out his 10 goals that he hoped to accomplish in his lifetime (lifetimes, actually).

“I’ve achieved eight of them,” he said. “When you’re 20, you have no bounds of society on you. My travels have altered my life. I’m not afraid of a challenge. It doesn’t scare me at all.”

Roadtrip is available on line at Amazon.com, but you can probably get it quicker by visiting Jewell’s Web site: www.RoadtripBabyBoomer.com.

You can also pick it up locally at his office, Jewell Real Estate Agency, 5602 New Jersey Avenue, Wildwood Crest.

Oh, didn’t I mention—he’s also a real estate agent?