Did you ever hitchhike? (long distance, 13 year old, restaurant, girl)
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As a teen, before I could drive, I often would hitchhike around town. A lot of people did then and we didn't think much of it. In the later 60's I had friends that hitchhiked across the country and back, this was when a lot of places had some pretty hard feelings about "long-haired hippies". They had some interesting stories to tell. They said they were going to do it again and wanted me to go with them. They told me there was going to be this huge rock concert/festival in New York. I debated and then declined. I would have been to Woodstock.
I'm trying to remember back to a 6 month foray through Europe by thumb almost 50 years ago, I was a teen from the US & on my own. I remember a friendly US serviceman picking me up in Germany & giving me a good long ride who mentioned that I was "pretty quiet", very true - I was on the road at the beginning, a bit unsure & I'm naturally a bit reserved. I also discovered being a passenger on a long car drive would make me sleepy. Fairly soon after that I got a ride from a middle-aged German who was a WWII vet who went on a diatribe about how stupid the American bombers were back then because they were bombing their own troops. I kept my own counsel.
Somewhere, northern Italy I think, I stopped a Butcher Shop van that had hand painted images of meat on the side panels: a ham, a drumstick with a happy face, etc.. when the door opened it was full of hippie-type travelers like me, the driver had bought the van for cheap in Amsterdam & intended to drive to Istanbul... or India, I can't remember. The back of that van was a party at 60 mph for a few days.
Most interesting was a car I got into after leaving Italy, 4 motley guys heading down the Yugoslavia coast (Croatia today). First of all Croatia was beautiful & I thought that Greece would be the big deal, not so, I've always wanted to go back. At the southernmost border was Albania, we looked at the map & no roads went in or out of Albania in those days - it was the North Korea of Europe, so we turned hard east & followed the southernmost "road" on the map heading east to get around it to get to Greece ultimately.
We started off on a very nice early fall day but within a few hours of what turned out to be more up than east, we were in a snowstorm on a mountain. When we got down on the other side of the range late that day we were in another world. The roads were barely paved if at all & men walked around in turbans & some still wore those shoes where the toe curled up into a point. We had entered what today is Kosovo & apparently was the western remnant of the old Ottoman Empire, I couldn't believe we were still in Europe & not Turkey.
The next day or so, in the middle of nowhere in Kosovo, we drove past a hippie with a backpack walking the road. We stopped & picked him up, he was almost looked like a member of ZZ Top. He got in & started to talk about his many experiences in various monasteries & how he was following a spiritual path throughout the world. He talked nonstop for about 45 minutes & then ended with "Hey, how did the Lakers do this year?"
He mentioned that he had been barred from entering, or kicked out of, various countries. We assumed it was braggadocio until he showed his passport with all the "No Entry" notations. We 4 got nervous & stopped for a rest stop in God-knows-where rural Kosovo, I mean this was the definition of "nowhere", & when he went out of sight we threw his backpack out of the car & gunned the car down the road. I hope he made a friend of St Christopher in one of those monasteries he was kicked out of for "knowing more than the monks."
And the next day we hit an actual regional city & I fell in love, but that's another story.
When I was young, my best friend and I hitched everywhere, both locally and cross country. We had a couple close calls where it was probably divine intervention that we weren't murdered. That being said, it was super fun.
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So many great rides, so many interesting people, so many adventures!
One memorable hitchhike ride at 3AM became chasing UFO's on the Colorado Prairie during 1970's cattle mutilations.
It was nice to finally get back to town the next morning. (alive).(semi truck had broke down and I was ALMOST home from my nightly run (SD, WY, CO, NE)... ) So close... then so FAR AWAY!
The shocking truth behind the 10,000 animal mutilations in America’s heartland
As a teen in the 70s I hitchhiked every day, rather than ride a school bus to and from school. Hitched pretty much everywhere until I had enough money for my first car at age 18. Only 2 creeps ever picked me up in 5 years of daily hitchhiking. Was able to get out in both cases without any issues but would never pick up a hitch hiker these days. People are way crazier now than when I was young.
Oh sure, I hitchhiked and more often pickup hitchhikers back in the '70's-80's. One guy was holding a gas can, said it helped him get rides and no he didn't run out of gas. Thought that was clever.
But then they went away and the few ones you see look like people I don't want to pick up. I picked up one such looking fellow maybe 10 years ago and for the first time I felt uncomfortable, so that's the last one I picked up and perhaps the last one I have seen since then.
Between age 12 and 19, I hitchhiked, as well as picked up hitchhikers when I was between ages 16 - 19. It was a different world back then, but it was still a risky thing to do in either case. It was the seventies, and I dressed very 70s, so men usually picked me up. Some hit on me, but I never came to any harm - by the grace of God, because it wasn't smart, and I could have ended up dead on a roadside somewhere just as easily. Toward the end of my 19th year I met my husband, and he wasn't picking up anyone - don't ask!
I would pick up young people. If you looked like a hippie and had a backpack my childish brain would register you as harmless, but of course, I now know it could just as easily mean you are a psychopath who knows how to bait his victim.
I wouldn't even think of hitching a ride today. We have cell phones. I would call for help, even if it ended up costing me money. If I saw you broke down or seeming in distress I will make a call to get someone out there to check you out, but I will have to err on the side of caution and leave you there.
Im not a young kid anymore. Life has taught me not to so easily trust people anymore. Its kind of sad in a way, but its smarter to think of my own safety above anything else.
The PCT hikers frequently stick their thumbs out but towns along the trail kind of watch out for them.
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