We never had holidays when I was a kid. My dad ran a diner and worried that if he ever closed, his customers would go elsewhere. I reached adulthood without even having been on a day trip to the beach.

When I was 19, I dropped out of college and ran the diner myself while dad was sick. When he was well again, my best friend persuaded me to take off for three months. We threw a couple of duffel bags into the back of my car and left without a plan, other than to drive and see what happened.

We travelled through Carolina, Georgia, Florida, across the Panhandle into Mississippi and Alabama, and ended up in New Orleans doing things I had seen in movies, like jumping freight trains and seeing where we ended up. For a young man who had never been out of the Washington tri-state area, the sense of freedom and adventure was incredible.

These days, I’m pretty much a homebody — I don’t do relaxing very well. My ideal holiday is stolen between intense bouts of work. We tend to spend our time off at a house on the coast at Ocean View, in Delaware. It’s only a three-hour drive from home, and at the mouth of a river, so I can swim in the sea or kayak through some beautiful scenery, but still get back to work when I’ve had enough.

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My father was Greek/American and I grew up surrounded by Greek culture. We’d eat Greek food and listen to Greek music, speak the language at home, and on Saturday nights Greek friends would come over to play cards, drink and talk — but we never visited the country. When I was at college, I decided to spend the summer of 1980 in Europe, and got my first taste of where my dad was from. I started and ended the trip in Athens, where the culture and the people felt very familiar.

From Greece, I took the train to Amsterdam and met up with a friend before travelling down through Europe to Italy, then got the ferry back to Athens.

By that time, we were completely broke, but we got off the boat and started talking to a man on the quay who, when he heard my name was Pelecanos and that my dad was from Sparta, took us back to his house to meet his family. His wife cooked us dinner.

That’s something I can never imagine happening in this country, and it reinforced my initial sense of being at home. Back then, the way of life in Greece was still very simple and very Greek. There were old men with moustaches clutching worry beads, sitting outside cafes, smoking and drinking coffee all day.

These days, Greece has become more like the rest of the world: the men with their brandy and the women clad in black have given way to Gap and Banana Republic. I have a great nostalgia for the old way of life, and every now and then get swept up in a place that has managed to hold onto it.

A few years ago, I went on a book tour and ended up in Mantua, in northern Italy, which totally fulfilled my idealised notion of what Europe is like. It’s a beautiful town, complete with a castle and cobbled piazzas, and surrounded on three sides by lakes, but what I loved most about it was the way of life. Everyone seemed to be riding a bicycle and stopping off on their way home from work to buy improbably plump vegetables from local markets. Even though the evenings seemed to be dedicated to drinking and smoking, everyone looked healthy.

The most beautiful place I have ever been is New Zealand. I took off with my wife in the early 1990s, and we hired a camper van and drove all around the North Island, hiking through forests and past glaciers, and staying in the most beautiful camp sites. After that, we moved on to Australia and drove from Sydney up to the Great Barrier Reef.

The thing my wife remembers most clearly was hitting a kangaroo that dropped out of the sky into the path of our car. My overriding memory is of the topless beaches. There are very few in the States, but in Australia there were plenty, full of extremely good-looking people — which really helps you to get over the trauma of killing a kangaroo.

George Pelecanos talked to Lizzie Enfield

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