In 1969 I hitched with a buddy from Monterey to L.A. to see a couple of football games, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. We ended up taking a bus from Anaheim to L.A. and I lost my wallet on the bus with tickets to both games inside it. We went to the Coliseum where the games were played and explained our situation to the lady in the ticket office and she gave us great tickets for both games for free. She said I had an honest face. Both of my teams lost (by combined score of 100-7.) We made it back in time for Monday morning reveille having met a number of great people (including a cop who dropped us off where it was legal to hitch instead of arresting us.)
In Hawaii you often see the kids with their boogie boards giving the “mahalo” sign to people, which means they are looking for a ride to the next beach or someplace.
I did a few times back in the early to mid 70’s. I even dated one of the guys who picked me up for quite awhile.
I saw a guy just yesterday trying to get a ride. He was an older heavy set guy and I was tempted to help him out, but his T-shirt discouraged me. It read in very large letters, “Watch more porn, Whores are starving.”
Although his concern for the whores does sound touching.
I did mostly in the 70s; I didn’t find it fun so much as another way of getting distances on the cheap. I was also an easy touch for picking up hitchers especially on the bike. Never had an issue or a real creep but I had developed a sort of eye for warning signs.
You still see some around the interstate and turnpike ramps. Hate to admit it but its been quite a few years since I gave one a ride. These days it just doesn’t seem worth the risk. Just too many more nut-jobs out there.
Ha Ha, I forgot about Wawa! (For those unaware Wawa, in northern Ontario, is a fabled hitchhiking hellhole. For reasons lost in the mists of time, it is notoriously hard to get a ride!)
Though we went out of our way to avoid it we got dropped at Wawa. There were two young men there, on the side of the road, looking miserable. One was just lying in the ditch staring up at the sky, neither were happy. Turned out they’d been there a couple of days, though also having tried to avoid getting dropped there!
I knew we would not wait long for a ride, and the idea of doing so, right beside them made me wince. So I told my Chinese friend to “Follow me!”, and we set off marching along the big curve of the highway, away from them. Now this was back in the day of those big moon man style packs, and we had camping gear, etc, plus a guitar! My friend was not impressed with the march and started asking what the hell we were doing.
So I explained I felt we should get far enough along the curve that they wouldn’t see us get picked up. So on we marched. And it was a long, wide curve. My friend kept looking back, growing impatient, but finally we were actually out of sight. We flung our packs down and plunked down to rest.
Had a ride out of Wawa, without even sticking out our thumbs, in under a minute!
I haven’t thought of this in decades!
All the time in Russia. It isn’t really hitchhiking in the usual sense, since it’s a financial transaction rather than just relying on the kindness of strangers. You can stop a car, tell the driver where you’re going, and agree on how much you will pay. If I’m by myself, I will only accept a ride when the driver is the only person in the car (for safety reasons), but I’ve never had any bad experiences.
I’ve never hitchhiked in North America, with one exception. My husband and I were caught in the most almighty thunderstorm I’ve ever encountered as we walked along a country road. My husband flagged down a car and asked the nice Southern lady if she would give us a ride back to town. She did. Very kind of her.
I always walked whenever I hitchhiked (70’s/80’s), if nothing else, to demonstrate that I was actually going somewhere.
Once, I was dropped off at a gas station at an interchange on an Interstate highway. That would have been a good place to stand and wait, if it hadn’t been for about 20 other hitchhikers standing and waiting. So, off I trudge, in the hot Arizona sunshine. When I was finally picked up (a mile or two down the road), the driver let me know that the only reason he picked me up was because I was walking.
The sunburn wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be.
I hitched from PA to VA once in the early 80s. It was okay for most of the trip. I got rides from some truckers, a USMC recruiter, and a couple elderly people. On the last leg of the trip, I got picked up by a fellow who indicated that we were going to his place and we were going to have us some sex, no discussion and no refusing. I convinced him that it was urgently necessary to his safety that he stop the car and let me out. I spent the last of my cash on a cab to get where I was going.
The only hitchhiking I’ve done has been during long-distance backpacking trips, hitching from where the trail meets the road into the nearest town. If I don’t get a ride, it’s no big deal as I was planning on walking all day anyway.
I spent a summer guiding rafts down a river in North Carolina. Lots of people in that area hitchhiked - myself included - getting between the put-in point and take-out point. It was a distance of about 8-10 miles.
zombie or no
decades back were some good rides. on a couple occasions i even beat drive time.
We used to hitch a bit in college, as due to parking restraints, you couldn’t have a car on campus until you were a junior. Since we mostly got rides from other students, it wasn’t scary. Sometimes you made a friend. And being female, I always traveled with at least one other person.
I used to occasionally hitchhike in the early through mid-1970’s, when I was in undergrad school/college. When I had a couple of weird experiences in which the guys that picked me up started out with benevolent enough conversation, but then their talk slid into sexual innuendos and overtones, I quickly excused myself and got out. Reading and hearing about a whole slue of young women who ranged in age from their late teens through their early 20’s who disappeared and turned up dead while hitchhiking to school, work, or whoever also made me decide to stop hitchhiking, especially since Boston was in the national spotlight for a number of weeks, because of all those young women who were killed while hitchhiking.
Another grisly incident in my old hometown (an idyllic suburb northwest of Boston) that I read about involved a group of high school kids out on a late Saturday night/Sunday morning double date, and who decided, for some reason, to hitchhike home. They were picked up by two men in a car, who’d been drinking, but did not seem hostile, at least not at first. The girls were let off first, but then things took a nasty turn.
The teenaged boys were then taken to a secluded spot near the Lincoln-Waltham line, and physically attacked by the two men who’d given them a ride. One of the teenaged boys received a concussion due to being hit over the head with a blunt, heavy instrument, and the other one barely escaped being mowed down by their attackers’ car while the two boys were running to get help. A horrible scene overall. I decided, right then and there, not to hitchhike any more after that, and haven’t done it since.
No matter what anybody else says or thinks, getting into a car with a total stranger, or letting a complete stranger into one’s car and thereby putting oneself and others at the mercy of a total stranger or strangers is not worth the risk of serious injury, robbery, assault, or possibly worse. Even though most people are perfectly normal and honest, the risk of being picked up by or picking up people who are are not so normal and/or honest, is still there, and very real, to boot.
I have made a few trips with my thumb, but it was a long time ago, before I got a car.
I got out of US Navy boot camp, in San Diego, back in 1962 and took a bus back home to Houston, Texas. I said that would be the last time I ever took the bus with the chemical smell of the rear restroom still in my bumpy ride.
I hitched back to San Diego after two weeks leave and went smooth all the way to El Paso when a rodeo rider picked me up and said I could drive his car as he then managed to start drinking from a whiskey bottle. He let me off in Arizona and I got a ride with an 18 wheeler all the way to San Diego.
A year goes by and I thought well I made it once I can make it again. This time I was going east from San Dego and a Mexican family picked me up (no english) as they let me off in the middle of the night off hwy 8 before Tucson. They took a desert road to some where leaving me on the side of the road. I don’t know how the trucker saw me in my Navy blues, but he did and picked me up cussing, “Hey man what are you doing out here in the middle of no where in the middle of the night”?
This is around November/December 1963 when again I got let off by a trucker this time outside of El Paso where hwy 10 went one way to Houston, still 700 miles away, and the other hwy 20 went north to Dallas.
It was high noon and the road was two lanes in those days and not one car came by for over an hour. When the first van that came along didn’t stop I felt like throwing rocks at him. The next car that comes along is a brand new Cadilac with a small trailer with a Honda motorcycle on it with a couple of racing shells.
Turns out that he was the VP of Honda Motorcycles USA and was going major city to major city to sell his new bikes. We stop in Austin at some man’s home who has motorcycles for sale in the back yard. He gets his order and winds up taking me all the way to Houston right to my front door after buying a six pack of beer and sharing one with me.
I have other stories too, but I was only 19 and my mother bought me a 63 Falcon and I drove back to San Diego.
I’ve done it two or three times, but only for short hauls. Once was when I was at a conference, over Easter weekend, and the nearest Catholic church was beyond walking distance from our hotel. Our advisor was the only one with a rental car, for insurance reasons, and he gave a friend and I a ride to the church, but being the Easter vigil, it was tough to predict when it would end, and this was before everyone had a cell phone. So we went out in the parking lot afterwards with thumbs out.
The other time or two were from the airport back into town after trips. There was only one taxi company in Bozeman, and after they incompetently made me miss a flight and made no attempt to make it right, I decided I would never patronize them again. There was bus service in town, but it didn’t go to the airport, and friends weren’t always available for a lift, so that left hitching.
Back in the day (late 1970s to early '90s), I did quite a lot of hitching. I had the wanderlust pretty bad back then and it was a cheap, entertaining (albeit slow as molasses flowing uphill at times) way to travel. I crossed the USA from East to West and back more than once or twice, and up and down the West Coast a whole lot. Never had much bad happen to me while traveling; got hit on a few times (a polite “no” usually sufficed to end the matter), picked up by a couple of drunks but always made it out okay: never met the notorious Freeway Slayers (obviously!). The worst thing that happened to me was getting proselytized at by religious believers or dropped off in a really bad place to catch a ride out of.
The stories of bad rides were around in those days, and I heard some harrowing ones from the survivors; my attitude was either you had the nerve to ride thumb or you didn’t, and I wanted to get somewhere nine hundred miles away so I’d just better have it. It’s true that I got hungry and cold and impatient on occasion, and rained on some, and sunburned too, but that was just part of the adventure. My only experience of train hopping was from Spokane, Washington to Minot, North Dakota, and it convinced me that I was much more a hitcher than a hobo.
I haven’t seen another hitchhiker in years and years. I think the road has gotten a lot rougher since the turn of the century. I wouldn’t hitch now because it seems way too difficult or flat-out impossible in these suspicious days, and I’ve gotten older, achier, creakier and more nervous myself; but if I drove a car, and saw someone with their thumb out, I’d almost certainly give that person a ride.
I hitchhiked only a little, Berkeley to Reno round-trip the only long run. Like you, I encountered several loonies, but never felt threatened. (That trip was several months before the Zodiac killer appeared on the scene.)
As kids we hitchhiked everywhere. a few hundred miles is about the furthest for me. usually the 8 mile trip to the beach and the occasional 100 miler to San Diego or Santa Barbara. It was rare we didn’t catch rides in less than 1/2 hour, usually about 10 minutes.
Many people nowadays don’t hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers, because hitchhiking is way too risky. The fact that most people are perfect normal and honest doesn’t reduce that risk. It’s not like crossing the street, or attending a dance, or a party, or going to a bar or a nightclub and meeting somebody, where there’s always the option of ducking out quickly and/or calling for help when things start to get dicey.
I would never, ever pick up a hitchhiker, either. Letting a total stranger or strangers into one’s car also puts the driver and his passenger(s) in an extremely vulnerable position; there’s little or no control over what may happen. Options for fleeing, calling for help, or physically defending oneself if the situation turns nasty and/or violent are extremely slim to none, either in the case of getting into a car with a total stranger, or letting a total stranger into one’s car. ’
Also, just because a woman is standing on the side of the road with her thumb out, doesn’t mean that she may be innocent either. First of all, there’s no reason why one can’t be ripped off, or even beat up, physically, by a woman. Secondly, the woman could be acting as bait for any guy or guys who might have bad intentions, if one gets the drift.