Stories - give us ya best, most unbelievable story

I used to hitch hike a lot, way back when. I first hitched when I was about 13-14, but this was my first major long distance trip. It started out driving a car with two friends. We headed from the Eastern US out to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Then on to Arizona, the Grand Canyon, and southern / central California. During this time, two of us weren't getting along well with the third guy. So we decided to leave him and start hitching. This was just north of San Francisco, along Route 1.

But before I start on the hitching part I gotta mention the bear. Before SF, we stayed a few days in Yosemite National Park in a smaller remote campground. We weren't in a tent, just a tarp set up as a lean-to with the front open. So I woke up one night, and maybe 20 feet away was a bigass black bear with a little cub. We were on the ground in sleeping bags, and vulnerable, but the bear left us alone. I have to say that when you are lying on the ground, a bear looks huge.

Later that night I heard a crash. I saw the bear reaching inside the car window, grabbing something. Then she ran off. She broke into the back car window, opened an ice chest, and stole a loaf of bread. We all got up and noticed that other campers were also up. Apparently the bear broke into 5 cars that night. The next morning the ranger said it's fairly common.

OK, back to SF. So north of SF we started hitching. I had done local hitching, but not long distance. Basically we didn't know what we were doing. We had TONS of stuff. Backpacks, duffle bags, all kinds of stuff. You are supposed to travel light, but we didn't know that. I knew how to travel lightly in the wilderness, but didn’t realize that hitching was much the same, with almost as much walking. Or at least at times there could be a lot of walking.

I think we waited less than a half hour for our first ride. We hopped in the car and were off. We were pretty stoked. We were 3000 miles or so from home, had just left the car behind, and had taken off on foot. Maybe it was crazy, but there was a certain excitement and anticipation.

After a couple rides up the coast, we got our third ride from two girls and another guy. They were in a little Opal Kadet. Turns out the girls were sisters, and the guy was another hitchhiker who had already been with them for a week.

Oh, almost forgot the kid!

The spot where the girls picked us up was next to the coast. Beach on one side of the road, and a dusty dirt road on the other side, winding back into a valley. There were no people or buildings in sight. Later we noticed a kid walking down the dirt road toward us. A young kid, like 8-10 years old. Just the kid, nobody else in sight. He walked straight up to us. He said he was told to come out and see if we wanted to join their commune.

Back then there were communes everywhere. So now we knew what was back in that valley. I'm sure they were hippies living there. Never mind that we were complete strangers, we looked like hippies also. So might as well invite us to the commune, right? Makes sense. However, having just started our adventure, we turned the kid down. I suppose that would have been a completely different adventure if we had accepted.

Sooo, the kid was gone and we eventually got a ride from the two girls. They were moving to Oregon, and their car was packed. They already had lots of stuff, and we had lots of stuff. But we managed to get everything into, or on top of the car, and squeezed ourselves in. Off we went.

We were cruising up the coast, enjoying the scenery, passing around a certain smokeable substance, and generally enjoying our adventure. (I should note that "passing around substances" was pretty traditional when picking up hitch hikers. It was just polite to light up.)

After a while we started noticing an odor. Not from the substance, but from the car itself. All that weight in the car, going up and down hills along the coast, and it burned up the transmission.

North of SF is all fairly remote, with only small towns dotting the coast. So the car was struggling along, barely making it up the hills, when it finally gave out completely, just as we reached an isolated lodge of sorts. It was the rustic kind of place in the woods with small cabins for rent. The girls had money, so they rented two of the cabins for the five of us. It was decided that the girls would hitch to the next town and look for another car. So they paid ahead for the next night at the cabin, and took off. Us guys went swimming in a nearby river and just chilled out for the day.

Early the next day the girls got back with an old car. They had met a guy who had a sad story about his wife leaving him, and he'd been drinking for days. For some reason he decided he was going to give away his car. He gave the girls the key, with a note saying it was theirs. He gave them directions to where the car was. It was old, but drivable. We transferred our stuff to the new car and just left the old car sitting there. Off we went again.

The new car was quite a bit larger than the old one, but still crowded with five people and all our stuff. So the girls decided they wanted something even bigger. Up the coast a ways we were looking around for a new vehicle. We found a really old step van, like a large cube truck. We decided to get it, but the seller was going to do some work on it first. So we were driving around wasting time, when another car started honking at us and motioning us to pull over. So we did. They walked up and asked, "Did you know that car is stolen?" Um, no we didn't, not my friend and I anyway. They believed the story about the drunk guy giving away his car. We DID have the keys, and the note. But of course they wanted the car back.

By then the step van was ready. We transferred everything to the van and were on the road once again. This van was big, with a double bed in the back, along with a full size couch. Over the next few days we picked up more and more hitch hikers. At one point we had eleven people in that van. Certain substances were being passed around like crazy, with smoke pouring out the windows like that Cheech and Chong movie Up In Smoke.

We were with the girls for five days, with them paying for everything. We made it from north of SF to Crescent City near the Oregon border. Then the step van broke down also. It blew the engine (cracked block). The girls decided to hitch up to Eugene Oregon where they were originally headed. They gave the other guy 100 dollars to fix the engine (about 500 in today's dollars). My buddy and I never did trust this other guy. He was playing the girls. He "said" that the engine was too expensive to fix, and was going to hitch up to meet the girls instead of fixing it. We knew he had no intention of doing that. Anyway, we split up and never saw him or the girls again.

After another day and a few more rides we made it to Oregon. Then we got a long ride in a van. It was going all the way to Seattle (about 500 miles or so). We got the ride early and made it to Seattle that same day.

I didn't mention that when we had those 11 people in the step van, that two of them were from Seattle. We had their address and phone number and were supposed to call them if we were ever in Seattle. Hitch hiking being what it is, travel times are pretty unpredictable. So when we called them they hadn't arrived yet.

We needed to kill some time. We were actually in Redmond Washington, which was outside of Seattle. It was a small town then, without much to do. We decided to watch a movie to pass some time. We still had all that stuff we were lugging around. We couldn't take it into the theater, so we left it in an abandoned parking lot, behind some bushes.

After the movie it was starting to get dark. When we went to get our stuff, it was gone. No food, no sleeping bag, not anything. We had very little money, so we went to a McDonalds and got some fries to split between us. That was our lunch and supper for the day. We had no camping gear, and were in the middle of this town with no place to stay for the night. We found an abandoned old house that was unlocked. So we went in. We slept in the basement. There were a couple pieces of old ratty carpet we used. One under us, and one for a blanket. It was cold, but not freezing.

The next day, we went back to where we left our stuff, to look again during daylight. Not to be found. We called the guys from Seattle, and they had arrived. They came to pick us up. It was like a reunion, so of course that called for lighting up. Just after lighting, we suddenly saw police lights behind us. Shit, we were busted. We opened all the windows to let the smoke out, and pulled over. The cops didn't care about the smoke though. They looked straight at my buddy and I and asked if we lost some camping gear. How the hell did they know that??? We didn't have THAT much to smoke. That was really really strange.

So now I have to backtrack. Back before we started hitching, when we still had a car. We had gone to the Grand Canyon and decided to hike to the bottom. Spent the night at Phantom Ranch. Then wasted time the next day because we didn't want to start the return hike until evening when it started to cool down. It gets super hot down there. The hike out is pretty grueling because of the heat, over 5000 foot climb, and lack of oxygen due to elevation. We stopped about midway for a break. We were using a stick to play with a baby sidewinder (a type of rattlesnake). Along the trail comes two girls. Topless girls and smoking some of that substance. What's that got to do with anything? Nothing. Just wanted to throw in some boobies.

So we finally made it to the top. We were freaking exhausted. After dinner we decided that we wanted hats to keep the sun off. So we bought some hats at the gift shop. They were black cowboy hats. But we were hippies, not cowboys. Back then, cowboys HATED hippies. So we ripped the hatbands off, and scrunched up the hats to make them look like floppy hippie hats. The boobies didn't have anything to do with the story, but the hats do.

So we had just been pulled over by the cops in Seattle. They asked if we lost out camping gear. WTF? Like seriously WTF? As it turned out, someone had seen our gear in the parking lot, and seen us walking away. They had called the cops to keep our stuff safe! We were described as two hippies with black floppy hats. The cops saw two guys with black hats in the back seat of the car. So they pulled us over. I swear we didn't have THAT much to smoke. This really happened. Those black hats we bought to keep the sun off, 2000 miles away in the Grand Canyon, is what got our gear back for us. All we had to do was go to the police station and describe the stuff so they knew it was really ours.

We stayed three days with those guys in Seattle. Swimming, camping, jumping off cliffs, smoking. My buddy happened to have a cousin in Seattle. So we dumped most of our stuff on him, and he shipped it back east. Now we were proper hitchhikers with just a backpack.

It was time to start heading back east. So off we went. A day or two later we were in Spokane Washington. A fairly typical western town. It was pretty late at night when we got there, so we spent the night in Spokane. There was an alley near the highway. We decided that was the best we could do.

There was a bunch of drunk Indians there. (This was back when they were still called Indians) Apparently there had also been some drunk cowboys, harassing the Indians. Us being hippies, we were obviously on the Indian's side, not the cowboy’s side. So the Indians told us to sleep, and they'd watch out for cowboys. We slept fine. No cowboys attacking the Indians, or us.

More rides heading east, across northern Idaho, into Montana. Made it to Glacier National Park. Spent three days on a glacier. BTW, taking a shower in glacier melt is really cold.

Next was Yellowstone. We waited eight hours just outside the park trying to get in. Finally got a ride into the park….by a van full of hippies who were passing around a bottle of whiskey…..while they preached religion at us…really strange.

Got a campground at Yellowstone. Lots of hippies there. Big party that night. Lots of drinking. Lots of smoking. Lots of guitar playing and singing by the campfire. Next morning, lots of hangovers.

Got a ride to the edge of the park. Then nine more hours trying to get a ride out. That pretty much sucked. We had the Lord of the Rings books with us though. So we read much of the day. Frodo liked maps. We liked maps. Frodo was on an adventure. We were on an adventure. It all fit.

Finally got a ride. Next town was a small western cowboy town. Got a ride fairly quickly from there. Some guys in a pickup gave us a ride. They told us that it was rodeo night and we needed to get out of town before the rodeo ended. Drunk cowboys after a rowdy rodeo and hitchhiking hippies did not mix.

Got several rides across Wyoming. Eventually we got a long 1200 mile ride straight to the town we were from. Made a phone call to get a ride all the way home.

A week or so later it was time to leave for college. Another trip back across the country. The dorms were not open yet so I stayed in a motel that night. That was my 18th birthday. Then the fun began.

That was before computer games. There was no such thing as computers. We were stuck with "real life". And it was a freaking blast. Reading some of the stories in this thread, it sounds like people still know how to have fun and adventure. That’s good to hear.