A modern Hitch Hiking story
Created | Updated Sep 15, 2006
Hitch hiking is the mode of transport that brings everyone on this site together. Without it, we would all be lost, roaming cyber space kicking our heels and probably starting MySpace accounts. But the sad thing is that hitch hiking is dying out. Some may even say that its dead.
I wish to add evidence contrary to that belief. Below is a recent hitch hiking story for you to read and enjoy, and I hope it will inspire more researchers to actually get their thumbs out.
Its 8am and, in North Wales at least, it is pissing it down. I know this all too well because I am standing by the side of the road wondering why the hell am I here. It’s wet, it’s cold and I can’t remember the last time I left my house this early. I’ve been stood here, waiting by the Bangor Tesco store, for over half an hour now. Another 30 minutes pass, and I realise that the sign in my hand says A5, whilst the sign above my head says A55. A quick correction and 5 minutes later and I am in a Pets at Home lorry heading Eastward away from the hell-spawned weather. Why did I think hitchhiking was a good idea again?
Well, to tell the truth, it was never my good idea in the first place. Well it was, but I was forced into it. It started, as all these things do, with a simple internet conversation. My friend’s 21st birthday was around the corner, and to celebrate, he’d hired out a rugby club, got bands to play and organised a Hawaiian theme night for everyone to get obliterated and pay homage to his 21 years of life. He then made it clear that if I didn’t turn up, his boot would be approaching my crotch at high velocity in the very near future.
So, in order to get out of this foot-to-groin situation, I contemplated what I could do about getting there. Driving and trains were out of the question as my bank account is currently going through a bit of a dry spell, and when I say a bit dry, I mean as in Death Valley is a bit dry. So I turned to my heroes for inspiration. I thought, “What would Hendrix do? Probably take a load of acid, play a guitar with his a*se cheeks, then strap some C4 explosive to it and stumble behind cover, not very useful.” I considered a few other heroes of mine, arriving at similar conclusions, until I got to Arthur Dent, then it all made sense what to do.
“Arthur Dent?” Chris, the driver of the Pets At Home lorry, mused to himself. He took a moment to take in the ridiculous story I just told him for wanting to hitchhike over 200 miles, “Shouldn’t you have a towel?” Chris is a freelance trucker and also the first person to give me a lift. He explains to me how most truckers aren’t actually allowed to pick up hitchhikers anymore, but as he is freelance, he can “Pick up whoever the bloody ‘ell I want.” Just as well really, if I had been stood there for any longer, even my trusty towel wouldn’t have been enough to get me dry.
After an hour or so of rumbling down the A55 and the A438 whilst commenting on how Little Britain is a new low in English comedy, we pull into the Pets At Home store in Wrexham. This is the end of the road for Chris, and he’s quite glad of it too, because he can “finally get my hands of the eef'n c'ts who loaded my eef'n lorry the wrong eef'n way round.” As he storms off towards the depot with a feint smile on his face that says in no unclear terms ‘Someone is going to get it,’ it suddenly dawns on me that I’m still wet, still nowhere near home and still in need of a ride before I get even wetter. It also occurs to me that I am in need of some new card.
Now, having worked in retail myself, I know of card in shops. I know it is in high abundance, low in demand and can usually be found wherever you go in any store of any kind. With this in mind, I headed into Pets At Home and was alarmed to discover that not only did they not have any card, but they’d be damned if they knew what this ‘card’ even is. Even the manager stared blankly at me like she was an extra in a George A. Romero film. I refused to give up on the people of Wrexham though. In that moment, I wanted to be seen by them as the Greeks had seen Prometheus, only less fire and more cardboard.
I left Pets At Home to their rabbits and their salt licks, and went next door to find cardboard. Surely in B&Q they would have at least heard of cardboard.
“I’m not sure exactly what you are after, sir,” the dim-witty spotty and maybe lobotomised sales assistant replied, in response to my card-related inquires.
“Card! I need to make a sign! For hitchhiking! See the bag?! You know what I mean, cars, thumbs, troublesome situations with fat hairy truckers?!”
“Thumbs, sir?”
Fortunately, B&Q hire people with an IQ over 30 for such occasions, and one of these super-employees suddenly materialized behind me. Well, she could’ve just walked up without me noticing, she was pretty short after all. “We keep all our cardboard for recycling over here,” she said while pointing to a largest bin filled with all the cardboard in Wrexham. She smiled at me, cut the half man-half space hopper a look of ‘You’ve got a date with the black and decker later,’ and disappeared into the ether of the paint section.
Armed with a new sign, I hit the roads again, headed for the A5 and Birmingham. After about 5 minutes, of sticking my thumb out, a Jesus Army battlewagon pulls into view. Great, Christians, they will give me a lift, or so I thought. What I actually got from them was a dirty look quickly followed by the diesel based vengeance of the Lord aquaplaning through a puddle and getting my new sign quite wet. Fortunately, the following car saw what happened and pulled up. Although I never caught the man’s name, in ten minutes he told me he was a Buddhist, saw what happened, explained how he would’ve stopped anyway, berated Christianity and it’s faults, told me the best ways to get a lift and dropped me off by the A5. I quickly forgot about it and went back to hitching, but this was not to be my one and only encounter with the feared Jesus Army.
It was another half an hour waiting before my next ride. Whilst waiting though, I tried to put into action the techniques my Buddhist friend had taught me. He told me to make eye contact with every passer by and smile, but don’t look like a maniac. The perfection of this technique is the key to hitching, and it allows you to take a much closer look at the people who pass on by. The first thing I noticed is that the people who pass you by the most are rich business men in really nice cars with no passengers. They see you, and they speed up. They also all believe themselves to be Jedi. Every time they pass you by, they wave a hand in front of their face as if to say, ‘You don’t want a lift.’ Of course, I did try countering their Force Powers with my own, but they had inevitably driven off at rapidly increasing high speed by that point.
My ride came from one that I pre-empted. I caught one coming off the roundabout and telepathically told him, ‘You want to pull over.’ At least so I thought. I was heartbroken to discover that he was on his way to V Festival and thought I was too, and that I hadn’t suddenly become adept in the ways of the Force. He then explained to me that he was getting in for free because his employer got him free tickets, and that his employer is Evolution Studios, developer of many computer games including upcoming PlayStation 3 release title, Motorstorm. It just so happens that festivals and computer games are very much my thing, so we launched off on a long and in depth conversation about them. So long in fact, it wasn’t until 20 minutes into the ride that I actually got round to finding out his name was David.
David has been a computer game programmer for quite some time now. Although he has successfully ripped off Pac-man and worked on quite a few other games, he had never worked on any major titles, but the PS3 was about to change all that for him. With the completion of a PS3 release title, his career will rocket, and he plans to aim that rocket at Australia so that he doesn’t have to put up with living in England anymore. And as the rain beats down for the third time today, I can’t say I blame him really.
After a long in-depth conversation about the PS3 and how it will compare to the already well established X-Box 360, David gets a call from a friend. Apparently, his friend filled up on oil for the journey to V, but because he didn’t replace the oil cap, has broken down outside Oxford in a glorious oil-spurting display. On this note, David decides he has to go and rescue him by hunting down a new oil cap. I decide that hitchhiking 200 miles in a day is enough of an adventure, and choose that now would be a good time to part ways so he drops me just outside of Birmingham.
The next lift doesn’t take too long to appear, but long enough for me to note the vast amount of VW Wagons going the other way to me towards V Festival, each one with a grinning hippy in happily smoking a spliff and either sticking their thumb up at me, shrugging helplessly or just grinning manically. The lift is with a guy who runs his own kitchen and bathroom sales company. At first he seems nice and on a level, but after a minor traffic incident, he begins to get very angry at nothing at all and I begin to get nervous. He starts talking about his anger management issues and how he can just lash out over the smallest thing, and I decide that now might be a good time to start talking liberally about my mixed martial arts background. Eventually, we get to J7 on the M6 where he drops me off and I’m glad of it.
Or at least, I was glad. The ensuing two hour wait for a ride slowly destroyed that. It didn’t seem too bad at first. Not long after I started, a taxi driver pulled up and offered me a free ride to Leamington Spa, but I turned it down, not realising that a/ Leamington Spa is in the right direction and b/ how long I’d be stood there for the next ride. What seemed like days passed, and in my mind, I thought I was about ready to give up and make my way to a train station. But no, I kept at it.
A white van pulls up next to me, but I already know it’s not for a lift. I saw as it passed me that the front was full, and, by the way the wheels are slowly moving, I know exactly what their intentions are. I deny them the pleasure of wheel spinning off and leaving me looking upset by the wayside by picking up my bag, taking one step towards them to excite them, then putting my bag down and going back to getting the thumb out. Dejectedly, they move on. I mean, I know this is my first time hitchhiking, but what do they take me for, a News of the World reader? Taunt denied. But at that moment, a Jesus Army minibus passes by with some passengers misreading the event and laughing at me. For a minute, I daydream about karma manifesting itself into physical form and Buddha taking out their ride with an RPG.
Even though I’ve had hours of intensive training through computer games, this hitchhiking is really beginning to take it out on my thumb by now. I’ve sat down, stood up, jumped, used a sign, not used a sign, waved a sign above my head, acted cool, acted panicked, even gone to the lengths of making a completely new sign saying “Don’t Panic” on it, but still, nothing. And it’s begun to rain again. It’s as if the rain has been chasing me all the way from Bangor, hell bent on getting me soaked and ruining my entire experience. I feel hungry, restless, despondent. I’m about to give up all hope when a car pulls up. I don’t even go to check who it is or where they are going, I just jump in and they start driving. 10 seconds later I come to regret my haste as I realise that I just jumped in a car with 3 hardened pikies.
Their thick irish-yet-not accents, the smell of marijuana smoke, the fact that they are all drinking and not wearing seatbelts, and baseball caps and the scars on their knuckles, the idiotic dance techno music, the constant phone calls to dealers all make me think I’ve made a very silly move and after I’ve had an embarrassing accident of the toilet nature, they are going to take me to a warehouse and turn me into food for the V Festival. Still, at least they aren’t the Jesus Army.
It takes several minutes for me to accustom myself to the accent. Until that point, I could’ve been nodding and smiling to anything. I start talking to them, putting on my best hard man face. They tell me they are going to Luton and can drop me off at my destination. ‘Great,’ I thought to myself, ‘Not only are they gypsies, but they are Lutonian gypsies.’ They ask me about my drug knowledge, if I’ve ever gone down on a woman, and why the hell I’m hitchhiking. They laugh at my answers, and crack out some weed for me to smoke. Not wanting to get stabbed, I accept their generous offer.
The joint hits me like a sledgehammer to the groin and I instantly space out. For a moment, I’m in a warm world all of my own, but it doesn’t take long before I realise where I am and the paranoia sets in hard. I’m in a car with people I don’t trust at all, and for all I know, anything could be in that joint. I’m stoned and vulnerable to attack. Had I just signed my own death warrant by having a toke? Am I really going to be turned into highly overpriced burgers and lukewarm hotdogs? They are avoiding the gaze of police cars and talking in Gaelic. Are they planning to set me up for some crime they have committed? My brain is on overdrive, what the hell is going on?
Then the driver does something that proves me wrong. We come off the motorway up to some traffic lights. In the queue on the lift hand side is a brand new BMW M5. They are all in awe, especially the driver. So much so in fact, that he reverses the car, winds down the window, and yells across to the proud owner,
“That’s a real nice car ya got dere.”
“Why thank you,” The owner responds
“But why’d ya have ta go get it in a**hole brown?”
To which the entire car bursts out in manic fits of laughter, including one of the dealers on speakerphone. Just to add to it, the owner of the BMW adds in his snootiest tone, “actually, it’s sepang bronze.”
I get the feeling they could sense my ease, so just to give me one last scare before I get my final drop of the trip, they tear round the back roads of Luton at about 100 mph, suddenly bringing back that whole toilet based incident feeling I had earlier. But, before I know it, I’m there. I’m 200 miles from Bangor and, courtesy of some reckless driving, it’s only taken 8 hours to get there. As I walk into town, I get the greatest feeling of euphoria come over me, and just when I don’t think it can get any better, it hits it’s pinnacle. I see the sign, “LEIGHTON BUZZARD”
‘Leighton Buzzard?!’ you must be thinking, ‘I’ve read all this tripe for a story about getting to Leighton Buzzard?!’ Well, if I told you I was going to Leighton Buzzard, the ditch between the soul destroying Milton Keynes and the dark viod of Luton, you wouldn’t have read all this, would you? But now you know of my first experience with hitchhiking in full. As for me, it was one of the greatest and most enjoyable challenges of my life to date. I didn’t think that hitchhiking was possible in this day and age, but it actually is, and it is bloody fantastic.
But as I sit my friends front room waiting for the party, drinking my well earned beer and drowning in a lack of praise for my accomplishment with the rain that so longed to ruin my day coming down torrentially outside, I can only think one thing, ‘Oh bloody hell, I have to hitch all the way back now.’
Gregg Bayes
I wish to add evidence contrary to that belief. Below is a recent hitch hiking story for you to read and enjoy, and I hope it will inspire more researchers to actually get their thumbs out.
Its 8am and, in North Wales at least, it is pissing it down. I know this all too well because I am standing by the side of the road wondering why the hell am I here. It’s wet, it’s cold and I can’t remember the last time I left my house this early. I’ve been stood here, waiting by the Bangor Tesco store, for over half an hour now. Another 30 minutes pass, and I realise that the sign in my hand says A5, whilst the sign above my head says A55. A quick correction and 5 minutes later and I am in a Pets at Home lorry heading Eastward away from the hell-spawned weather. Why did I think hitchhiking was a good idea again?
Well, to tell the truth, it was never my good idea in the first place. Well it was, but I was forced into it. It started, as all these things do, with a simple internet conversation. My friend’s 21st birthday was around the corner, and to celebrate, he’d hired out a rugby club, got bands to play and organised a Hawaiian theme night for everyone to get obliterated and pay homage to his 21 years of life. He then made it clear that if I didn’t turn up, his boot would be approaching my crotch at high velocity in the very near future.
So, in order to get out of this foot-to-groin situation, I contemplated what I could do about getting there. Driving and trains were out of the question as my bank account is currently going through a bit of a dry spell, and when I say a bit dry, I mean as in Death Valley is a bit dry. So I turned to my heroes for inspiration. I thought, “What would Hendrix do? Probably take a load of acid, play a guitar with his a*se cheeks, then strap some C4 explosive to it and stumble behind cover, not very useful.” I considered a few other heroes of mine, arriving at similar conclusions, until I got to Arthur Dent, then it all made sense what to do.
“Arthur Dent?” Chris, the driver of the Pets At Home lorry, mused to himself. He took a moment to take in the ridiculous story I just told him for wanting to hitchhike over 200 miles, “Shouldn’t you have a towel?” Chris is a freelance trucker and also the first person to give me a lift. He explains to me how most truckers aren’t actually allowed to pick up hitchhikers anymore, but as he is freelance, he can “Pick up whoever the bloody ‘ell I want.” Just as well really, if I had been stood there for any longer, even my trusty towel wouldn’t have been enough to get me dry.
After an hour or so of rumbling down the A55 and the A438 whilst commenting on how Little Britain is a new low in English comedy, we pull into the Pets At Home store in Wrexham. This is the end of the road for Chris, and he’s quite glad of it too, because he can “finally get my hands of the eef'n c'ts who loaded my eef'n lorry the wrong eef'n way round.” As he storms off towards the depot with a feint smile on his face that says in no unclear terms ‘Someone is going to get it,’ it suddenly dawns on me that I’m still wet, still nowhere near home and still in need of a ride before I get even wetter. It also occurs to me that I am in need of some new card.
Now, having worked in retail myself, I know of card in shops. I know it is in high abundance, low in demand and can usually be found wherever you go in any store of any kind. With this in mind, I headed into Pets At Home and was alarmed to discover that not only did they not have any card, but they’d be damned if they knew what this ‘card’ even is. Even the manager stared blankly at me like she was an extra in a George A. Romero film. I refused to give up on the people of Wrexham though. In that moment, I wanted to be seen by them as the Greeks had seen Prometheus, only less fire and more cardboard.
I left Pets At Home to their rabbits and their salt licks, and went next door to find cardboard. Surely in B&Q they would have at least heard of cardboard.
“I’m not sure exactly what you are after, sir,” the dim-witty spotty and maybe lobotomised sales assistant replied, in response to my card-related inquires.
“Card! I need to make a sign! For hitchhiking! See the bag?! You know what I mean, cars, thumbs, troublesome situations with fat hairy truckers?!”
“Thumbs, sir?”
Fortunately, B&Q hire people with an IQ over 30 for such occasions, and one of these super-employees suddenly materialized behind me. Well, she could’ve just walked up without me noticing, she was pretty short after all. “We keep all our cardboard for recycling over here,” she said while pointing to a largest bin filled with all the cardboard in Wrexham. She smiled at me, cut the half man-half space hopper a look of ‘You’ve got a date with the black and decker later,’ and disappeared into the ether of the paint section.
Armed with a new sign, I hit the roads again, headed for the A5 and Birmingham. After about 5 minutes, of sticking my thumb out, a Jesus Army battlewagon pulls into view. Great, Christians, they will give me a lift, or so I thought. What I actually got from them was a dirty look quickly followed by the diesel based vengeance of the Lord aquaplaning through a puddle and getting my new sign quite wet. Fortunately, the following car saw what happened and pulled up. Although I never caught the man’s name, in ten minutes he told me he was a Buddhist, saw what happened, explained how he would’ve stopped anyway, berated Christianity and it’s faults, told me the best ways to get a lift and dropped me off by the A5. I quickly forgot about it and went back to hitching, but this was not to be my one and only encounter with the feared Jesus Army.
It was another half an hour waiting before my next ride. Whilst waiting though, I tried to put into action the techniques my Buddhist friend had taught me. He told me to make eye contact with every passer by and smile, but don’t look like a maniac. The perfection of this technique is the key to hitching, and it allows you to take a much closer look at the people who pass on by. The first thing I noticed is that the people who pass you by the most are rich business men in really nice cars with no passengers. They see you, and they speed up. They also all believe themselves to be Jedi. Every time they pass you by, they wave a hand in front of their face as if to say, ‘You don’t want a lift.’ Of course, I did try countering their Force Powers with my own, but they had inevitably driven off at rapidly increasing high speed by that point.
My ride came from one that I pre-empted. I caught one coming off the roundabout and telepathically told him, ‘You want to pull over.’ At least so I thought. I was heartbroken to discover that he was on his way to V Festival and thought I was too, and that I hadn’t suddenly become adept in the ways of the Force. He then explained to me that he was getting in for free because his employer got him free tickets, and that his employer is Evolution Studios, developer of many computer games including upcoming PlayStation 3 release title, Motorstorm. It just so happens that festivals and computer games are very much my thing, so we launched off on a long and in depth conversation about them. So long in fact, it wasn’t until 20 minutes into the ride that I actually got round to finding out his name was David.
David has been a computer game programmer for quite some time now. Although he has successfully ripped off Pac-man and worked on quite a few other games, he had never worked on any major titles, but the PS3 was about to change all that for him. With the completion of a PS3 release title, his career will rocket, and he plans to aim that rocket at Australia so that he doesn’t have to put up with living in England anymore. And as the rain beats down for the third time today, I can’t say I blame him really.
After a long in-depth conversation about the PS3 and how it will compare to the already well established X-Box 360, David gets a call from a friend. Apparently, his friend filled up on oil for the journey to V, but because he didn’t replace the oil cap, has broken down outside Oxford in a glorious oil-spurting display. On this note, David decides he has to go and rescue him by hunting down a new oil cap. I decide that hitchhiking 200 miles in a day is enough of an adventure, and choose that now would be a good time to part ways so he drops me just outside of Birmingham.
The next lift doesn’t take too long to appear, but long enough for me to note the vast amount of VW Wagons going the other way to me towards V Festival, each one with a grinning hippy in happily smoking a spliff and either sticking their thumb up at me, shrugging helplessly or just grinning manically. The lift is with a guy who runs his own kitchen and bathroom sales company. At first he seems nice and on a level, but after a minor traffic incident, he begins to get very angry at nothing at all and I begin to get nervous. He starts talking about his anger management issues and how he can just lash out over the smallest thing, and I decide that now might be a good time to start talking liberally about my mixed martial arts background. Eventually, we get to J7 on the M6 where he drops me off and I’m glad of it.
Or at least, I was glad. The ensuing two hour wait for a ride slowly destroyed that. It didn’t seem too bad at first. Not long after I started, a taxi driver pulled up and offered me a free ride to Leamington Spa, but I turned it down, not realising that a/ Leamington Spa is in the right direction and b/ how long I’d be stood there for the next ride. What seemed like days passed, and in my mind, I thought I was about ready to give up and make my way to a train station. But no, I kept at it.
A white van pulls up next to me, but I already know it’s not for a lift. I saw as it passed me that the front was full, and, by the way the wheels are slowly moving, I know exactly what their intentions are. I deny them the pleasure of wheel spinning off and leaving me looking upset by the wayside by picking up my bag, taking one step towards them to excite them, then putting my bag down and going back to getting the thumb out. Dejectedly, they move on. I mean, I know this is my first time hitchhiking, but what do they take me for, a News of the World reader? Taunt denied. But at that moment, a Jesus Army minibus passes by with some passengers misreading the event and laughing at me. For a minute, I daydream about karma manifesting itself into physical form and Buddha taking out their ride with an RPG.
Even though I’ve had hours of intensive training through computer games, this hitchhiking is really beginning to take it out on my thumb by now. I’ve sat down, stood up, jumped, used a sign, not used a sign, waved a sign above my head, acted cool, acted panicked, even gone to the lengths of making a completely new sign saying “Don’t Panic” on it, but still, nothing. And it’s begun to rain again. It’s as if the rain has been chasing me all the way from Bangor, hell bent on getting me soaked and ruining my entire experience. I feel hungry, restless, despondent. I’m about to give up all hope when a car pulls up. I don’t even go to check who it is or where they are going, I just jump in and they start driving. 10 seconds later I come to regret my haste as I realise that I just jumped in a car with 3 hardened pikies.
Their thick irish-yet-not accents, the smell of marijuana smoke, the fact that they are all drinking and not wearing seatbelts, and baseball caps and the scars on their knuckles, the idiotic dance techno music, the constant phone calls to dealers all make me think I’ve made a very silly move and after I’ve had an embarrassing accident of the toilet nature, they are going to take me to a warehouse and turn me into food for the V Festival. Still, at least they aren’t the Jesus Army.
It takes several minutes for me to accustom myself to the accent. Until that point, I could’ve been nodding and smiling to anything. I start talking to them, putting on my best hard man face. They tell me they are going to Luton and can drop me off at my destination. ‘Great,’ I thought to myself, ‘Not only are they gypsies, but they are Lutonian gypsies.’ They ask me about my drug knowledge, if I’ve ever gone down on a woman, and why the hell I’m hitchhiking. They laugh at my answers, and crack out some weed for me to smoke. Not wanting to get stabbed, I accept their generous offer.
The joint hits me like a sledgehammer to the groin and I instantly space out. For a moment, I’m in a warm world all of my own, but it doesn’t take long before I realise where I am and the paranoia sets in hard. I’m in a car with people I don’t trust at all, and for all I know, anything could be in that joint. I’m stoned and vulnerable to attack. Had I just signed my own death warrant by having a toke? Am I really going to be turned into highly overpriced burgers and lukewarm hotdogs? They are avoiding the gaze of police cars and talking in Gaelic. Are they planning to set me up for some crime they have committed? My brain is on overdrive, what the hell is going on?
Then the driver does something that proves me wrong. We come off the motorway up to some traffic lights. In the queue on the lift hand side is a brand new BMW M5. They are all in awe, especially the driver. So much so in fact, that he reverses the car, winds down the window, and yells across to the proud owner,
“That’s a real nice car ya got dere.”
“Why thank you,” The owner responds
“But why’d ya have ta go get it in a**hole brown?”
To which the entire car bursts out in manic fits of laughter, including one of the dealers on speakerphone. Just to add to it, the owner of the BMW adds in his snootiest tone, “actually, it’s sepang bronze.”
I get the feeling they could sense my ease, so just to give me one last scare before I get my final drop of the trip, they tear round the back roads of Luton at about 100 mph, suddenly bringing back that whole toilet based incident feeling I had earlier. But, before I know it, I’m there. I’m 200 miles from Bangor and, courtesy of some reckless driving, it’s only taken 8 hours to get there. As I walk into town, I get the greatest feeling of euphoria come over me, and just when I don’t think it can get any better, it hits it’s pinnacle. I see the sign, “LEIGHTON BUZZARD”
‘Leighton Buzzard?!’ you must be thinking, ‘I’ve read all this tripe for a story about getting to Leighton Buzzard?!’ Well, if I told you I was going to Leighton Buzzard, the ditch between the soul destroying Milton Keynes and the dark viod of Luton, you wouldn’t have read all this, would you? But now you know of my first experience with hitchhiking in full. As for me, it was one of the greatest and most enjoyable challenges of my life to date. I didn’t think that hitchhiking was possible in this day and age, but it actually is, and it is bloody fantastic.
But as I sit my friends front room waiting for the party, drinking my well earned beer and drowning in a lack of praise for my accomplishment with the rain that so longed to ruin my day coming down torrentially outside, I can only think one thing, ‘Oh bloody hell, I have to hitch all the way back now.’
Gregg Bayes
