Been re-reading The Canada Chronicles by Matthew Jackson recently, which is an account of some guy’s hitchhiking adventures over a four year period in the 90s in my country. Fun read, made me wonder if anyone here as any stories they want to share (will also accept shout outs for someone else’s cool hitchhiking story).
No, the dangers being female made me far too nervous to do that.
I do remember seeing around one handful of hitchhikers during my childhood, but we never picked them up. I can hear my mothers tongue click when I asked why we didn’t help them.
Came here to say this. Lock doors as soon as you get in, and start driving. Don’t rummage around, it gives time to potential attackers to get you before you even start the engine.
I don’t see as many hitch hikers now, but maybe because of my travelling routes. Even then, I still won’t pick anyone up.
Ya. Beats walking. All my experiences were good. Haven’t hitchhiked in 20 years tho.
I’ve hitchhiked a few times. Mainly in the mountains when I missed a last (or only) bus of the day after a hike. We also try to pick up hitchhikers whenever we see them. Last time it was a paraglider who had landed in a random field and needed a ride back to town. So far my experience (as a young woman) has been good and the scariest experience was when a driver went about 20 kph above the 80kph speed limit on a bendy mountain road. I now hike with my (medium size) dog and find it’s a lot harder to hitchhike.
Yes, and I have also picked up hitchhikers. Hitchhiked from north England to Scotland, picked up a few times locally, never any trouble, no adventures.
I’ve personally only hitchhiked twice.
The first time isn’t all that interesting. I was camping with my parents as a teen. I was a smoker at the time and had ran out of cigarettes. My parents didn’t know about (or were deliberately ignoring) my habit. The closest place that sold smokes was about a two hour hike away. So I told everyone at camp I was going for a hike and hoofed my way there. I managed to finangle a couple packs of cigarettes, but was at a loss - I knew I was going to be in shit if I just disappeared and returned four hours later. I decided to try my luck and stuck my thumb out. After about 15 minutes, I got picked up by some guy in a pick-up, pretty chill. Got dropped off at my camp with no one the wiser.
Again, not interesting in itself, but was a “Whoa, some people actually do pick up hitchhikers these days” learning moment.
Second story is only slightly more interesting:
Still a teen (about 16-17 I think?) living in Victoria, BC. A friend who had moved to the mainland had come back to visit. One evening, I asked “Hey, have you ever been to Saltspring Island?” He said no, and it was decided among our crew that this would change the next morning, since none of us had visited.Saltspring is one of the southern gulf islands off the coast of Vancouver Island, about a half-hour ferry ride from Victoria. Naturally, as my mother would be quite concerned that her son was going on an ocean voyage, I spared her the worry and simply didn’t tell her. Three of my friends and I got on the first ferry of the day and made it to Fulford Harbour.
Now, Saltspring didn’t have a bus service, and while there is a taxi company it’s pretty expensive. So as my friends were starting to worry about how we were going to get anywhere interesting, I stuck my thumb out. My visiting friend stared at me like I was insane.
“You have to be joking.”
“Dude, just trust me on this one.”
“No one in their right mind is going to pick up four random guys.”A couple minutes after he said this, a sedan pulled over. Suddenly, all of us were crammed in with this delightful seventy year old woman, telling us about the local artisan she was visiting and the sizeable artistic community on Saltspring. She dropped us off in Ganges, the main town on the island. We spent the rest of the day puttering around, smoking terrible green pressed hash we bought off some kid there (who took us on a small tour that ended at a glass shop for a pipe, disappearing by the time we made our purchase), and generally having a pretty chill time.
Eventually, it was time to go. We struck up some discussions with folks in a parking lot near the edge of town. There was a guy with a passenger van that seemed promising, but unfortunately he already had some hitchhikers and couldn’t take us. There was another couple who was willing to take us, but only had room for two passengers. After some debate, we split up and left the other two to finangle their own ride.
Originally, the couple said they would drop us off at the ferry terminal, but after a little while they changed their mind and dropped us off in front of a yoga retreat. We were there for about an hour and a half.
Now I was starting to get worried. If we didn’t make it to the ferry by the last trip, we were capital ‘F’ fucked. None of our parents knew where we were, we had no place to stay, we had no idea how the other guys were faring, etc. Finally, a passenger van stops. It’s the same guy from before, only now with more room and the other two guys in tow. Apparently, they’d talked to him again, and came to some arrangement where he’d come back and get them. Everyone involved was pretty relieved.
So we made it back to the harbour, got on the boat, returned to Victoria and made our respective ways home. My mom greeted me with the following:
“DID YOU GO TO SALTSPRING ISLAND?!”
“What? No! Why would I go to Saltspring Island?”
“I didn’t know where you were, so I called [friend who didn’t come with us] and he said he thought you and your other friends were going to Saltspring!”
“What? All four of us going to an island 30 minutes into the ocean, with little money and no car? That’s crazy, who would do that?”I don’t think I’ve ever fessed up to my mom to this day.
What year did these two trips take place?
Between 2005 and 2006 (can’t remember if the first trip was the year prior to the second one, or the same year at different points of the summer).
As I was reading through this, I noticed I didn’t mention cellphones. I did have a cellphone at the time of the second trip for sure. Whether I turned it off on the ferry, or didn’t have reception on Saltspring, or left it at home, I honestly don’t remember. Probably the first or third option to avoid interactions with my mom while I was doing something dumb (I used this strategy a couple of times).
Never hitchhiked myself. Picked up a few over the years.
Last one was a guy from Germany who was walking from a wildlife refuge campground in to town to go to a museum. It was 21 miles to get there so the museum would have likely been closed by the time he got there. It was also forecast to be in the upper 90’s and quite a way before any services would have been available. He may have made it but I doubt he would been feeling too good with the amount of water he had.
I’ve hitchhiked from Finland to China and onwards to India.
And then of course shorter trips, such as many trips between Finland and Spain. Etc.
Absolutely the best way to travel anywhere!Absolutely the best way to travel! There’s a community for hitchhikers in the Forumverse, BTW: !hitchhiking@anarchist.nexus .
Well that’s an instant sub. Thanks!
And 100%. Risky? Yep (here in Canada we have something called the Highway of Tears in British Columbia, which for a lot of folks is the first thing that comes to mind when you say ‘hitchhiking’). But there’s some great experiences to be had as well alongside those risks.
I will acknowledge that as a white guy, the risks are slightly lower than they might be for other folks, and this is definitely a function of privilege. But specifically Canadian context, can’t speak for other places.
Used to hitchhike all over south west Scotland when I was a kid in the early '80s.
No real drama or stories except the one time three of us were hitching and the car that pulled over was being driven by a guy who was locally known as a ‘kiddy fiddler’.
Two of us hopped over a dry stane dyke, leaving just one kid to get a lift with him. Nothing happened to him, but in retrospect it was a shitty move on our part.
Oof - glad your friend got out of it unmolested (…no pun intended, I swear). Given everyone came out ok, chalk this one up to live and learn.
As I recall, we all just teased him for being so monumentally ugly that he was safe from molestation. It was a simpler time!
Like Mr Garrison being mad that his dad didn’t love him enough to molest him.
Not purposefully but I’ve been lost before hiking and someone on the road offer to drive me back to my car a few times.
Hooray for trail magic! Reminds me of the time I hoofed it to an outlying town and back (think it was about 8 hours round trip?), had a few folks slow down and ask if I needed a ride. Restores your faith in humanity a touch.
I hitchhiked through Ireland about eleven years ago. It’s not that easy to catch a lift in some parts, but I met a lot of lovely people during this little adventure.
Nice! Is there one moment of your adventure that jumps out when thinking about this time (granted, it’s likely a lot of interesting stuff could have happened along the way)?
I was kind of stuck on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere and it started raining cats and dogs. The weather and the road conditions made it unsafe for me to continue on foot. I held my thumb out to catch a lift and the first car passing by picked me up. It was a lovely young family with their two children in their van. They asked me where I wanted to go and I told them ‘just down the mountain back to proper roads’, but they insisted to drive me to where I actually needed to go, which was a detour of at least half an hour for them. Great people. :)
I hitchhiked a fair amount in Ontario, Quebec and Michigan in the 90’s.
Loads of fun. Nothing bad ever happened, but some fun stories and close calls on the US side.
Since there’s nothing better than a close call story, are there any you’d like to share? Feel free to balance it out with one of the fun stories as well if you want (since close call stories, as well as sheer bad outcome stories, colour a lot people’s impressions about hitching).
One of the more memorable ones was crossing Windsor to Detroit. After paying $2 to take a shuttlebus across as no pedestrians were allowed. Once we got to the downtown Detroit side we knew we would have a hard time getting a ride. We thought we’d look for a city bus to take us to a hitchhiker friendly highway. It was sundown, and you could literally see the junkies and nightlife crawling out of every nook and cranny like a bad zombie movie as the sun set. We went into a gas station for a map or directions. The gas station attendant freaked the fuck out at our presence.
He yelled at us " You guys are going to get robbed or killed just for your backpacks. You won’t last 20 minutes walking around like that. It’s getting dark and the crazies come out at night. You have to get the fuck out of here now! There is a greyhound station 2 blocks north, 1 block east. Get the fuck out of Detroit while you still can. Go now now now!"
Our faces went dead serious. We said thanks, confirmed direction by pointing and ran. Well as “run” as you can do with an 80L camping backpack. As we did, the orange glow over the city got dimmer and sundown turned to twilight, we saw the most concentrated group of unfortunates, and we were drawing attention. We heard catcalls and the like directed towards us. Yelling. A fight of somekind and gunshots or a car backfiring. We don’t know because we power-walked like olympians on meth.
We got to the greyhound and found a bus leaving in our direction for something cheap $12 that got us to Ann Arbor. We temporarily lost our taste for adventure. Our American friends during our visit to UofM suggested we do the same thing backwards to avoid dying. They concluded that we were book smart, but not very street smart for a couple of hitchhikers. We agreed.
As for fun, a different friend and I were hitchhiking in Northern Quebec near Ville-Marie and met two lovely Quebec girls from Montreal doing the same thing as us. We saw each other at a greasy spoon getting some warmth and hot coffee after a cool night in the woods and our backpacks identified the four of us as compatriots. We just smiled and waved to our intrepid fellow travellers.
We met again a little later trying to hitch rides in the opposite directions. After waiting for a while with no cars offering and little traffic, we crossed the road to chat. Turns out they were lovely people from Université de Laval, looking for adventure on the cheap like we were. We all got along so well, we decided to camp together just outside of town for one more night hoping weekday traffic would be better.
We spent a lovely night together drinking shoplifted wine around the campire, sharing stories of the road and school and dreams of what post uni life will be like. Good times.
Have not hitchhiked, but have picked up a few hitchhikers. If you spend enough time in the mountains you’ll eventually bump into people who need a lift to a trailhead or back to town. One young guy was juggling part-time gigs at multiple lodges and guide services, and hadn’t saved enough for a car yet. Another couple was touring from eastern Europe and decided to try traveling around the US without a car. They were all nice people.
I once picked up some hitchhikers near Saint Louis. They needed help getting to Colorado where apparently their brother had started having some success panning for gold.
