Share your adventures

I was thinking it might be fun to share some of our more memorable "road" stories. Doesn't have to be anything spectactular, just something that stuck in your memory.

For instance:

I was hitchhiking to Minnesota from New Mexico, in the summer of 1970, and I got a ride from a group of 5 college kids - two girls and three guys. I'd been on the road for months, so I had that typical, grubby, patchwork, road-weary look about me and they were asking how I managed to survive on the road all that time, without money or any means of support. Of course, the answer is obvious to those of you who have spent any time on the road without funds, and I replied that the Great Mystery provided for me in times of need. Whenever I was hungry, food arrived; whenever I was cold, warmth would come; whenever I was lonely, friends would be near.

We continued on, until they decided it was time to eat. They offered to buy me dinner and then split the cost amongst themselves. We stopped at a roadside diner, where I opted for the relatively inexpensive Carny Special, aka the Hot Beef Commercial, aka a hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy.

Afterwards, as we were rolling on down the freeway, they got out the bill to figure out who owed what. Somewhere during the calculations, they came to the realization that the waitress had only billed them for five dinners. The one that was missing was mine.

They all stared at me, slack jawed, and all I could do was grin sheepishly and shrug.

Here's another one:

I was in Tucson in Feb of 1971. I was there with my travelling companion, Stan, and three friends that we had met along the way - Chuck The Chick, Rev, and Elly. We had decided to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but we couldn't come to a consensus on how to get there. Chuck, Elly and Stan wanted to hang out in Tucson for another week and then hitch across Texas. Rev and I wanted to leave immediately for Boulder, CO, where we would find Rev's friend who was planning to driving to N.O. It would save us the grim prospect of hitching, yet another time, across the great, but somewhat hippie unfriendly, state of Texas.

Well, Rev and I left for Boulder, leaving the others in Tucson. We promised to meet up again on Bourbon Street and said our goodbyes. The trip to Boulder was uneventful, but when we had hiked up into the hills, to where his friend's cabin stood, his friend was not at home. We let ourselves in and helped ourselves to the shower and a sack of brown rice that we found under the counter. Later that night, a car pulled up to the cabin and we stepped out to greet the friend who was not expecting us, because Rev had gotten all the info from his mother, somewhere out east.

Rev was quite surprised to find that he didn't recognize the people who got out of the car. It turned out that his friend had sold the cabin two years earlier and the new occupants were complete strangers. It was rather awkward for a few minutes, and then they invited us in to stay the night.

Rev and I decided to hitch back to Tucson and meet up with the other three. Somewhere around the Colorado/New Mexico border, we got a ride from a guy with a van. I was in the back, on the floor, reading The Two Towers as we motored along the freeway, when I heard Rev exclaim, "Hey, I know those guys!" The van took a hard left, across the ditch dividing the northbound traffic from the southbound, and pulled up on the northbound side. I opened the side door and there stood Chuck, Elly, and Stan. They were coming north to find us.

What are the odds that we would find each other on the freeway like that?

 

Trigcove-
Your story was about hitchhiking. The first hitchhiking story that came to my mind - I was leaving San Francisco and going to Venice, California and I got a ride with someone going to LA. Just so happens they could drop me off on the Sunset Strip so I thought hey- why not ? give it a go. I didn't really like the strip that much- but I ran into this girl later that evening who would pay my way into Whiskey A Go-Go. That night Eric Burton and the Animals were playing so I said let's go for it! She just so happened to have a friend who was an army officer who had fought in VietNam and had had an unfortunate accident. He got schrapnel in his lower extremities . So he couldn't have sex with her. So he allowed her to find a hippie lover for the night- which turned out to be me. It was a great evening. Everything was paid for including the steak dinner that we had later that evening. And all I had to do was allow him to watch us make love. I guess in this day and age he'd probably watch porn. The next day when it was all said and done I realized that Venice was really the place I wanted to be. It was definitely weird but it wasn't really a bad time.

PAX
ps. there is actually more to this story but I don't want to see it in a movie one day....... LOL

 

I'm guessing that there's probably a LOT more to that story. Heh.

 

At the age of 50, after my children were all grown and gone, I kissed my husband one morning and started off on my bicycle by myself, riding from Montana to Arizona, where he came to pick me up. The trip took me almost four months, and was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. The things I saw and the people I met along the way were absolutely wonderful.

There was the lovely gentleman in Bluff, Utah who took me in out of the pouring rain and made me coffee and muffins, and told me of his long life until the rain stopped. There was the young couple near Salmon, Idaho who were cycling also, and had been on the road for almost a year. I rode with them for a week, and we had wonderful times together.

There were the two Navajo teenagers in northern Arizona who gave me a ride when I broke some spokes on my bike. They were astonished that a middle-aged white woman would be doing something like that, and they were very reluctant to talk to me at first. But by the time we got to Chinle, we were fast friends.

There was the sweet young man from California who gave me a ride from Chinle to Flagstaff, where I got my bike fixed. We had the most interesting conversations, and stopped at the Hopi mesas along the way to see those lovely old pueblos.

Ah, what fine memories

 

I guess I should tell one of my road stories.

I was hitching from Prince George BC to Winnipeg, then on down to Indiana and while on the road a follow traveler asked if I had any spare change, so I gave him all the money I had left. Not much but it would get him something to eat and I keep on going.

About a 100 miles out of Winnipeg, a woman a little older than me stopped and picked me up. While talking and cruising she asked if I was hungry and stopped and we got a burger.

As we approached Winnipeg she told me that she was going to Winnipeg because her daughter lived there and was getting married the next day, so she said she would like to give me a place to stay for the night but didn’t know what her daughter would say. So she left me on the side of the road and when she said goodbye, we shook hands and she palmed me a five dollar bill and drove away.

After about twenty minutes and no ride, a car pulled up in front of me and it was the lady and her daughter. She had told her daughter about me and the daughter said; why didn’t you tell him he could stay here, so they came and found me.

They were having a supper for the bridesmaids and had plenty left over, so they fixed me a plate and said; help yourself. We all sat and talked for hours and when the bridesmaids left, we talked some more and they fixed me a place to sleep.

The next morning they fed me big breakfast, made me a bag lunch for the road, dropped me back on the road and drove away waving goodbye.

 

Good story.
The generosity of strangers constantly used to amaze me.
When I think of all the troubles we could have encountered, I'm a little awestruck and humbled at the "milk of human kindness" that was poured out on us during our travels.

I once had a guy give me $20 for a hotel room, so I wouldn't have to sleep on the ground. I had another guy give me $25 so I could upgrade my sleeping bag, which at the time wasn't much better than two sheets sewn together. At various times, we were taken to parties, concerts, dinners, picnics, cook-outs and all manner of wonderful things.
One time, on the beach at Monterey, we met a little biker dude with three chicks and a huge box full of food. He invited us to hang out with them for hotdogs on the beach. When we got to where they were going, there were about 20 bikers. I don't recall which club, but they weren't Angels - anyway, they fed us and got us stoned and we had a great time. Turned out, the little dude was the leader. And there was another guy who was about 6'7" and 350 lbs. He went by the name of Tiny, of course.

The only really bad thing that ever happened to me in all that time was getting all my stuff ripped off on the steps of the student union in Berkeley. That was my own fault for leaving it unattended. Oh yeah, there was a night in jail in Junction, TX, too. Therein lies a tale for another time.

 

When I first started out I had a large Samsonite suitcase.

I hid it in Golden Gate Park and when I went back it was gone. At first I was upset but it just showed me I didn't need all that junk anyway. Lesson learned, after that I just carried a knapsack with a change of clothes and a bed roll, a couple of wool blankets, a couple of army rain ponchos and enough rope to make a tent out of the ponchos or to make a rope sling, to tie it all together and carry it.

 

Ouch... that suitcase must have been a pain to lug around.

We used to roll our sleeping bags up with our meager stuff, extra pants, shirt, maybe a couple of cans of beans, whatever, rolled inside. Then we tied off the ends with belts and used a couple more to make a sling so we could wear 'em slung across our backs.

Getting your stuff stolen could be potentially disaterous. It left you with just the clothes you were wearing and no bed. Thank God for free stores and churches and crash pads.

As you say, lesson learned. You only had to experience that once to get wise.

 

Interesting thread. I already wrote my hitch-hiking story in my memoirs some years ago and being lazy today, will just paste it in.

I have a really interesting story about providence that happened to me in New Orleans, tied to San Francisco that I will post somewhere else.

I underlined the part about Joseph, the road experience that made the trip so worthwhile. There were ppl who would help you, feed you and put you up for the nite.

Leaving San Francisco
September 1970

By September, with the seeds of my new spiritual awareness planted, I was ready to leave the overcrowded city of San Francisco and seek new experiences on the road back East. With everything I owned in my backpack I went downtown to an entrance to the freeway and took my place in the line of hitchhikers waiting for rides out.

Hitchhiking was as much a part of the Hippie subculture as long hair, beards, bellbottom jeans and dope. It was a necessary means of being mobile without having a car or money but as a modern mendicant it was also an exercise in spiritual acceptance, for you never knew who would pick you up.

On the winding road to Southern California I was picked up by a flashy middle aged couple in a Cadillac convertible who were drinking wine in stemmed glasses and traveling so fast I just sat back and accepted it as fate. We survived.

Going into Los Angeles after dark I was picked up by a young man named Joseph who took me to his home and let me crash on the floor. The next morning he gave me breakfast and took me to the freeway going to I-10. That experience really reinforced the sense of brotherhood that I was seeking.

In San Bernardino I was stopped and questioned by a cop who seemed to be checking me out more than just a transient. We talked a while and I realized that I was there for the benefit of his experience, that he too was a seeker. In Palm Springs a young woman picked me up so her boyfriend would know that she was riding around with another man. I was relieved to get out of there.

And so it went for five days, being picked up and propositioned by homosexuals, sleeping poorly on the ground, apprehensive of rattlesnakes, being stranded for hours at the fork of I-10 and I-20 in the wilderness of West Texas; often asking myself, "why am I here?' and getting the Zen answer, "because you are not somewhere else."

 

Hitchhiking was an awful lot of fun in the sixties, but one of the things that I tried to avoid as much as possible was being harrassed by the local police. But- they all weren't pricks. There was one time that I got let off in a real small town in the middle of the night. It looked like a storm was coming. I thought- oh shit- I'm fucked. Then a police cruiser pulled up and I kept telling myself : ok- just be nice and don't cause any ripples. well, it turned out that the police officer was the local sheriff of the county and he was as friendly as could be! So after talking to me for a while, he determined that I wasn't a threat to anything or anyone. He told me that he heard a storm was coming on the radio, and if I needed a place to crash, there was a picnic area in the park across the street that also had a bathroom and it wasn't locked. I could use it if iI wished. He also told me that when I got up in the morning that I could go to the local church where I could get a meal and a shower. I would have to work for it though. He also added that I shouldn't make myself at home because he would escort me out of town if he had to. I spent the night there and early in the morning I got a ride to Denver which was my destination. It turned out to be a very enjoyable trip.

PAX

 

I've had cops take me out to the outskirts of larger towns. I've slept in unlock cells that were offered as a place to get out of the cold.
I've occasionally wondered if I wasn't going end up shot in the desert, because the cop that was hassling me was going out of his way to be a badass.

Overall, I had more good experiences with cops than I did bad ones. Of course, I never went out on the road if I was holding any contraband. They're all badasses if you're doing something illegal.

 

Same here, but I never figured that was good enough reason to trust 'em. In the summer of '65 or '66, I hitchhiked through the deep South to Florida. Back then you could get a motel room down there for $2 a night, so that's usually what I did, but this one night I didn't.

I was in Claxton, Georgia, asleep on a picnic table in the city park, when I was awakened by a flashlight in my face that rivaled the surface of the sun in brightness, and a gruff voice saying, "What you doing heah, boy?"

This was in the days of the Freedom Riders, and southern law enforcement didn't take kindly to strangers that didn't talk like them. But I had reasonably short hair and I followed every damn word out of my mouth with "yes sir" or "no sir". After a conversation that was surprisingly cordial, they told me to go back to sleep but that I might want to be out of town in the morning. I got the hint.

Still, I wouldn't want to put them to the test. No doubt they would have sung a different tune if I'd been black or if they'd figured I was a Yankee troublemaker, in which case I'd probably be sitting in the Claxton city jail to this day.

 

I had a run-in in Junction, TX, back in '71. The guys I was riding with had a big bag of oranges and a bucket of raw peanuts that you could buy at any of a thousand road-side stands, back then. As we were riding through Junction, the sheriff pulled up behind us in the squad car. He pulled us over to check us out, but when he saw hippies in the car, he made us go down to the fire hall/sheriff's office. When we got there, they pulled out the oranges and the sheriff said to the deputy, "Those look like cousin Del's oranges, don't they?"

Well, they went and got "cousing Del" and he allowed as how those were his oranges and they had gone missing just this very afternoon. We got to spend a night in jail up above the fire hall and the next morning we went down to see the judge, who had set up a card table in the garage. We were encouraged to plead not guilty, and released on $5 bail, each (fortunately, one of the guys had a stash of travellers checks). The judge and sheriff netted $25 bucks and we got a night indoors and a bowl of soggy cereal, each.

Oh yeah, they took us over to the Highway Patrol office for fingerprinting. Somewhere in a dusty file in the back of some dingy little office in Junction, TX, is a set of my fingerprints.

 

Probably not any more. After all these years on job applications saying I was never arrested (some only ask for convictions - which is the only legit thing to ask for) I wrote to the San Francisco Police asking if I had any arrest record there.

Apparently, sometime in the past 38 years they threw them out. I was really hoping to get a copy of my mug shot.

 

One of my travelling pals from back then was jailed during the Tucson, AZ riots in Feb of 71. Later one, when he went back to the east coast and re-entered the world, he discovered that he was quite good at math and eventually ended up as a tenured professor at a fairly prestigious college out east. After he finished all the schooling, he thought he might try his had at being a high school teacher. This would have been around 1985 or so. Well, wouldn't you know it? The background check turned up his arrest in Pima Co. AZ. He could have spent a lot of time and money getting it straightened out, but he opted to set his sights a little higher. Apparently, the colleges consider it more of a badge of honor than the high schools do.

At any rate, I always get a chuckle out of thinking that my finger prints are hidden away in some dusty file, somewhere.

The real irony of that story is, after we'd finished our trip to New Orleans and were coming back the other way, we found ourselves sitting in the back of a pickup truck, on a downtown street of Junction, TX, on the day we were due back for court. The guy we were riding with said he had to pull over for a bit to take care of some business in town. We didn't even realize we were in Junction until I recognized the firehall/sheriff's office.
It was pretty tense, waiting for the guy to get back from his business, but we got out of town without being detected. Hell, they probably never even filed any of the paperwork, once they got the $25.

 

One time while wandering through Florida, I walked passed a roadside vegatable stand. It had a sign that said "sweet corn, 6 ears for a dollar". Man did I wish I had a dollar! Well about a block later sticking up out of the mud on the side of the road was a dollar! So I walked back to the stand and asked the guy if he charged sales tax, he just laught and said, "Only if you want me too!"

So i give the guy my quite filthy dollar. He put 12 ears of corn in the bag! So I thank the man a started to leave, and he says "Hey you forgot your change", And handed me a quite clean 20 dollar bill!

Without a doubt though, the wierdest thing I ever had happen was this.
I grew up in IL, and in my neighbourhood thier was this guy I used to see all the time. We were not freinds, we didn't know each others name, we would just see each other all the time, and we'd nod and smile as we passed.
So one day walking down the steet in Key West, I look up, and there's the guy walking toward me down the street! I'm thinkin' that can't be him. Well he looks up,and sees me. Man he got the most puzzed look on his face. I'm quite sure I had the same look! We didn't say a word to each other, we just grinned and nodded as we passed.

 

that is a very neat and concise example of where we are as human beings

 

i have never met a nice dept. of public safety office in texas,,man i think they brainwash these guys,,they are like SS troopers..but that is just the way they have treated me.

 

early 70's 71 or 72 cant remember for sure..any way we come up from texas to get high in the mountains,,just traveling..its summer of course,could not have handeled the winter in a corvair..four of us in this car with the american flag decal with a peace sign on it..so we pull into this park where a bunch of hippies are hanging out. nothing special happens and we start to leave.i am driving and soon as we pull out a local police officer pulls us over..he gets me out of the car and has me sitting in his patrol car..he is pissed,keeps clinching his jaw..he says to me that the decal on our rear windshield is defamation of the U.S. flag and if he searched my car he would probably find some drugs..man we are holding big time too..i decide to come over honest..i say to him i know you hate me, and yes you could probably put us away if you want to..i tell him something like we are not trouble makers and just passing through..anyway this man must of had some compassion..he let us go scott free..we scrathed that decal off soon as i got back into the car..that was a close call that was a good officer

 

I used to wear an old jean jacket with a flag patch sewn above the left breast pocket, upside down. I was once walking down the hall of a hotel, in Boulder, CO, where a friend of mine was staying, when a cop came walking from the other direction. He stopped me and pointed to the flag, saying, "Boy, you're flying the colors upside down."
I just nodded and said, "It's a nautical practice. It means the ship is in distress."

He shook his head and said, "Yeah, I guess it is, at that," and walked on.

We had found something that we could agree on, although I'm sure it was for different reasons.