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Why do people do it?page 4 – 7

The originspage 10 – 15

The heydaypage 18 – 47

The declinepage 51 – 53

Hitchhiking todaypage 56 – 83

The futurepage 86 – 93

Finding Freedom

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This book is exploring the process of hitchhiking. Looking at the reasons that people take part in it and how it has changed from its origins to today.

4

It's 4.15 in the morning and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see is gauzy darkness. For a brief moment, I manage to convince myself that my wakefulness is a mistake, and that I can safely go back to sleep. But then I roll over and see my zippered suitcase. I let out a sleepy groan: I'm going to the airport. The taxi is late. There should be an adjective (a synonym of sober, only worse) to describe the state of mind that comes from waiting in the orange glare of a streetlight before drinking a cup of coffee. And then the taxi gets lost. And then I get nervous, because my flight leaves in an hour. And then we're here, and I'm hurtled into the harsh incandescence of Terminal B, running with a suitcase so I can wait in a long security line. My belt buckle sets off the metal detector, my 120ml stick of deodorant is confiscated, and my left sock has a gaping hole. And then I get to the gate. By now you can probably guess the punchline of this very banal story: my flight has been cancelled. I will be stuck in this terminal for the next 218 minutes, my only consolation a cup of caffeine and a McGriddle sandwich. And then I will miss my connecting flight and wait, in a different city, with the same menu, for another plane. And then, 14 hours later, I'll be there.

The following text is an extract taken from Jonah Lehrers ar tic le travel makes you smarter, in which he discusses what makes up the human desire to travel.

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Why do we travel? It's not the flying I mind – I will always be awed by the physics that gets a fat metal bird into the upper troposphere. The rest of the journey, however, can feel like a tedious lesson in the ills of modernity, from the pre-dawn X-ray screening to the sad airport malls peddling crappy souvenirs. It's globalisation in a nutshell, and it sucks. And yet here we are, herded in ever greater numbers on to planes that stay the same size. Sometimes we travel because we have to. Because in this digital age there is still something important about the analogue handshake. Or eating Mum's turkey at Christmas. But most travel isn't non-negotiable. (In 2008 only 30% of trips over 50 miles were made for business.) Instead we travel because we want to, because the annoyances of the airport are outweighed by the visceral thrill of being someplace new. Because work is stressful and our blood pressure is too high and we need a vacation. Because home is boring. Because the flights were on sale. Because New York is New York. Travel, in other words, is a basic human desire. We're a migratory species, even if our migrations are powered by jet fuel and Chicken McNuggets. But here's my question: is this collective urge to travel – to put some distance between ourselves and everything we know – still a worthwhile compulsion?

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It's not good enough

for us to have

generations of kids

that look forward to

a better version of

a cell phone with a

video in it. They need

to look forward to

exploration.

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Many people born in the last days of Queen Victoria probably had their first taste of hitch-hiking in France during the First World War. The soldiers of the British forces in France did not use the term 'to hitch-hike'. This was not to come into everyday usage until the 1930's and according to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang it was a migrant word from the USA. The Oxford English Dictionary includes `to hitch-hike' in its 1933 supplement but classes it as American usage. The word common among soldiers in the First World War was 'lorry-hopping' or 'lorryjumping'. In his Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves, describing the difficulty of adjustment to the post-war world, has this to say:Other loose habits of wartime survived, such as stopping cars for a lift, talking to fellow travellers in railway carriages without embarrassment, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever might be about.It wasn't only officers and soldiers who used lifting as a way of getting round behind the lines in wartime France. Nurses did it too. A woman who later became matron at Guy's Hospital, Miss Macmanus, did a lot of lifting

Nurses did it too. A woman who later became matron at Guy’s Hospital, Miss Macmanus, did a lot of lifting on her days off:Another sister and I decided to ‘lorry-hop’ forward, to see one of the recently released French villages that had been in German occupation during the whole war. Luck was with us, for a staff car passed and kindly gave us a lift .... They set us down with good wishes and we took a left hand turn. Soon a lorry came along and we were speeding on the road once more ....A large number of individuals were involved in Great War lorry-hopping and in lifting on the way to football matches but these two types on hitch-liiking did not constitute mass activities. The first time lift giving and taking became a nationwide, mass activity was during the two week disruption of public transport in May 1926.The General Strike lasted from May 4th until officially May 14th but in fact public transport did not get back to anything like normal until several days later. Almost all the million or so cars on the roads of Britain at that time belonged to the upper or the middle classes. Throughout the twenties these people had feared massive disruption of the nation’s life by the working class in support of claims for decent wages.

Hitchhiking is something that we might think of as having its origins in the 60’s but it originally took off in the first world war, taken up by soldiers as a means of getting in a time where transport was much more difficult.

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In point of fact the General Strike was called to avert a cut in coal miners' wages. The car owning bourgeoisie were therefore united in their opposition to the strike. With the Baldwin government's encouragement car owners in their tens of thousands stuck notices on their windscreens: Signal for a lift, and filled their cars to the brim with people hitching to work.

Now the T.U.C. had only called out certain key industries and plenty of trade unionists still had to get to their work places each morning and back again at night time. Blackleg public transport was a direct challenge to the strike and so most workpeople avoided using it as much as they could. For those too far from work to walk and those without bicycles the only solution was to hitchhike. This was how the Communist paper, the Workers Weekly, summed up the situation in retrospect:

...While such of the wage earners as were not called upon to strike were quite willing to accept a 'lift'in a car... they persistently and unanimously shunned the tubes and 'buses run by avowed scabs' even when these were operating.In her book North Country Bred Stella Davies clearly expresses the quandary she and her husband found themselves in as socialists over the question of lift giving:To give or not give lifts had been debated by my husband and myself. We were anxious not to do anything that would be harmful to the strike action. My husband was continuing to work, for his form of employment did not fall into the categories called out by the T.U.C.... We were anxious not to be identified with middle class blacklegs.... We decided, as a compromise, that my husband should take two neighbours of ours, who were cleaners at a public lavatory, to work, for this, we thought, could only be to the good.On May 14, the T.U.C. called the general strike off and abandoned the miners to continue their stoppage alone. Public transport gradually returned to normal and lift- giving on the grand scale died a natural death. Its passing was mourned in a centre page article in the Daily Herald, the Labour Movement's paper:Civilisation must, if it has any reality, any value, make us ready to give anyone a lift in any way possible, not only at moments of crisis, but in ordinary humdrum times.

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Contrary feelings were apparent in a Punch cartoon on May 19th. This showed a large touring car pulling up for a chimney sweep, complete with his brushes. What consternation on the faces of the lady occupants of the car! Feelings of deep relief that lift giving was no longer a 'patriotic' and class duty were shared by Autocar. On May 21st it published a strip cartoon depicting the advantages of a new motoring accessory, the pneu innatable passenger. All the driver had to do was to pump the rubber dummies full of air and stick them in any vacant seats in his car: They provide an excellent foil to the importunate lift cadger.

Despite the 'pneu inflatable passengers' dreamed up by the Autocar cartoonist the 'importunate' continued thumbing lifts through the late twenties and the thirties. A new category of 'importunate' was the working man on the road not football bound but because he had lost his job. Men on the dole would move out of their home areas to try and find work. What little unemployment henefit they got had to be left for their families so they had little choice but to walk and to lift. Lorry drivers whose memories go back to this period vividly remember the plight of the unemployed whom they gave rides to. One driver I interviewed told me of a man he had picked up while leaving the London docks for Liverpool. They stopped off at the driver's home in East London before taking the A.5 Northwards. There was rabbit for dinner and 35 years later the driver still clearly recalls how ravenously the hitch-hiker ate his way through it.

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But not only the 'importunate' of the 'lower orders' thumbed lifts. Right from the first decade of the century there seems to have been a kind of free masonry among car drivers which impelled them to pick up their own kind when stranded or broken down. Toad of Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows (1909) expects this sort of solidarity from fellow motorists. He has just escaped from prison and is walking along a country road when suddenly he hears the sound of a motor behind him. He thinks:

This is something like! This is real life again, this is once more the great world from which I have been missed so long! I will hail them, my brothers of the wheel, and pitch them a yarn, of the sort that has been so successful hitherto; and they will give me a lift, of course.... Toad's expectations of his fellow motorists are paralleled by those of an angry gentleman writing in Autocar on 26 April 1929. At 1 a.m. he found himself without his car at Acton and needed to get back to his club in Kensington:I set out to walk. As a gentle hint to any generously disposed car driver to offer what one was always glad to offer in earlier motoring days -- the 'helping hand' -- I walked in the roadway. Several cars sped past; then emboldened by a painful shoe, weariness and the rain, l very apologetically signalled a car to stop....None did, and he was eventually picked up by a lorry. He ends his letter:I wonder if some of my fellow car owners, not my 'mates', did not feel a little of the shame I felt for them as they sped on comfortably into the night.

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Apart from giving lifts to other motorists in trouble, some car owners seem to have given lifts to the 'lower orders' out of a sense of paternalistic generosity, manfully shouldering what they saw as their white man's burden. In 1929 a correspondent in Autocar wrote:Whenever we can, we give our fellow creatures a lift. We consider that much class hatred, particularly that directed against the motor-car classes, would disappear if only the motorist would offer lifts to pedestrians. There should be a feeling of noblesse oblige in the breast of every owner- driver. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the history of hitch-hiking between World War I and 1939 is that it has been largely forgotten. The mass myth through the sixties and seventies has been and is that hitch-hiking started in Britain in the early forties. The bulk of the working population today have memories going back to World War II and in their consciousness hitch-hiking is something strongly associated with that war. The people who know different, who remember the Great Strike and slump hitching, are now of pensionable age and death is rapidly thinning their group out. Their scattered memories of prewar hitching have been submerged in the gigantic folk awareness of thumbing between 1939 and '45.This is a fascinating example of the selectivity and historical inaccuracy of the group memory of a nation, and of how the collective consciousness of a new generation can engulf and erase the collective consciousness of the previous one.

Hitler's war was to considerably alter the social pattern of thumbing in Britain. Hitch-hikers prior to 1939 tended to be 'cads of the lower order' and they usually received lifts from people of their own social stratum. 19th century hitch- hikers got 'casts' from stage coach men and waggoners, while the Mr Oakroyds of Priestley's Good Companions of the 1930's Depression were picked up by sympathetic lorry drivers. In pre-war days the non-manual rarely solicited lifts and certainly gave them much less than poorer folk.

The Second World War was to radically alter this picture: though far from marking the beginning of hitching in Britain, it ushered in a completely new period in the history of the habit.

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Nothing behind me,

everything ahead of

me, as is ever so on

the road.

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Jack Kerouac – On the road

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The Hippie Trail is one of the defining features of the hitchhiking boom of the 1960’s and 1970’s

The hippie trail is the name given to the journey taken by members of the hippie subculture and others from the late 1950s to the 1970s from Europe, overland to and from southern Asia, mainly India and Nepal. The hippie trail was a form of alternative tourism, and one of the key elements was travelling as cheaply as possible, mainly to extend the length of time away from home.

In every major stop of the hippie trail, there were hotels, restaurants and cafés that ca-tered almost exclusively to cannabis-smoking Westerners, who networked with each other as they travelled east and west. The hippies tended to spend more time interacting with the local population than traditional sightsee-ing tourists.

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The mecca for a lot of pilgrims of the hippie trail was Freak Street in Kathmandu flocking for the government licensed hashish shops.

Freak Street was the epicenter during the Hippie trail from early 1960s to late 1970s. During that time the main attrac-tion drawing tourists to Freak Street was the government-run hashish shops. Hippies from different parts of the world trav-eled to Freak Street (Basantapur) in search of legal cannabis. Direct bus services to Freak Street were also available from the airport and borders targeting the hippies looking for legal smokes. Freak Street was a hippie nirvana, since marijua-na and hashish were legal and sold openly in government licensed shops.[1] A young restless population in the west, seeking to distant itself from political and social frustration, had firsthand contact with the fascinating culture, art and ar-chitecture, and unique life style that attracted hippies to Freak Street. But in early 1970s the government of Nepal started a round-up of hippies on Freak Street and they were physically deported to India, an action propelled largely by a directive from the government of United States of America. The gov-ernment imposed a strict regulation for tourist regarding the dress codes and physical appearances. After imposing such regulations by government the hippies felt vulnerable and the hippie movement of Nepal died out in late 1970s. It was under this directive that the Nepali government came to ban the production and sale of hashish and marijuana in Nepal.[2] The hippie tourism was quickly replaced with the more respectable businesses of trekking and cultural tourism.

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What period in time were you hitching?

The 1970s to the 1980’s

JonDerricott

what made you start hitching?

Where I grew up was 7 miles from the nearest town & buses were expensive (to me anyway) and infrequent. I went to 2ndary school in town, so if I wanted to see my friends outside school, hitching was the only sensible thing to do. Once I’d started doing it from necessity, I realised that there were huge possibilities to get further afield & the randomness of the lifts and the encounters with people were usually enjoyable .

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Have you had any negative experiences hitching?

Loads! ranging from the cars that pulled up 50 yards past you and then roared off when you were running to them, to unwanted sexual advances, with long waits in the cold or rain in between. None of these were the norm though.

How do you think hitchhiking has changed from then to now?

Lot’s of changes, it’s a good question. Society has changed vastly in that time. Cheap forms of mass transport are more available and accounting for inflation, cheaper than they were then, giving less of the usual primary reason to hitch than there used to be. Less people hitch now, so seeing a hitcher is more unusual meaning perhaps that less people are likely to stop. That is also allied to the fact that several generations have now grown up without hitching being an accepted part of the culture, meaning that they are probably less likely to do it themselves and in turn less likely to pick people up when they become drivers. But there are still enough people will-ing to pick up hitchers to make it viable.

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What is your most interesting/enjoyable

hitching experience?

Hitching from Bradford to Frankfurt in the 80’s and getting stuck at the French/German border in the pissing rain at about 11pm. I was prepar-ing for a long and unpleasant night, when a car stopped and picked me up. He was going to Cologne and on the way there offered to put me up for the night. I slept in a very comfortable bed, had a shower in the morning and he gave me a lift back to the motorway. I was in Frankfurt by lunchtime. I was going to Frankfurt to take part in a European Juggling Convention & had told my generous host about it, including the fact that there was a public show to close the event. I can’t remember how we communicated in the world before mobile phones, but he came down to Frankfurt for the public show with his son & bought a great meal & drinks afterwards. A nice example of how generous people can be. I’ve also been given a lift by the police in Belgium (a lift, to where I wanted to go, not ‘picked up by the police’). I was hitching from Amsterdam and had a generous amount of ‘00’ in my bag!

Do you have advice for people wanting

to hitchhike?

The Nike thing, just do it. Mostly people are fantastic, have your radar on for the oddballs but don’t let the few of them that there are put you off.

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AngelaParton

What period in time were you hitching?

1970 to 1984

How do you think hitchhiking has changed from then to now?

More people have cars so less people hitch now. general anxiety about being picked up by strangers makes hitching less likely now.

what made you start hitching?Lack of money for public transport and wanting an adventure. It seemed an easy way to get from a to b.

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Have you had any negative experiences hitching?

Yes - waiting long times in the wet and cold but more specifically I was once dropped off by a lorry on the hard shoulder of the motorway and my friend and I who we're hitching didn't quite know what to do and then the police turned up and after questioning us took us to the nearest services which was pretty good of them (I was sixteen at the time). Also 2 bad experiences hitching in Europe when I was 19. the first was arriving at the Greek Turkish border in 1974 and having to turn back because it was closed (Turkey had invaded Cyprus, which was Greek, and they were at war) spent quite a long time in Thessaloniki with air raid warnings going off. we had set out to hitch to India on the hippy trail but our plans we're scuppered so spent the summer in Greece instead. After we had been in Greece for a while which was great with lots of friendly people we had a lift in the back of a farm trailer and there were a number of other people in there with us? when we got dropped off a man jumped out at the same place. After our lift had gone out of sight the man attacked us with a knife. we managed to fight home off and he ran away - that was quite scary.

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What is your most interesting/enjoyable hitching experience?

Lots of good times and probably more that I can’t remember - being fed and given places to stay. I think the best one if I have to choose just one is a lorry from just outside Leon in France who took us all the way to Nice, fed us on the way and even took a detour to drop us off on the promenade. I remember seeing blue sea for the first time. Coming from Blackpool I thought all sea was brown! Duh

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John Brooks

I conducted an inerview with John over email, he lives in the south west and did quite a bit of hitching in the 1960’s.

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Hello, im Annies friend Jack, I think she spoke to you before about me asking you some questions on hitchhiking. I would be really grateful if you could answer them below, they are going to be used for a book about hitchhiking! also if you had any photos of when you were hitching or just from around that time then again i would be really grateful! if you dont feel like answering any of the questions then no worries!thank you, jack.

On 1 April 2014 11:35, jack parton <jackparton@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

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On 1 April 2014 11:35: wrote: John Brooks (john.quiddlespendeen@gmail.com) wrote:

Hello Jack, Here are some random bits I thought might be interesting.

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My 1st hitch was from Falmouth to St Ives circa 1962 - the lift was with a crowd of Beatniks (pre Hippy), from London in a very old car (running boards + canvas roof -1930’s - a mass of adults children and dogs).

We hitched mainly because we didn’t have much money. Sometimes it was quicker than public transport especially on short trips. Once we took 18 hours to get to London from Cornwall, other times we got lifts in Broccoli lorries to Covent Garden. Lorry drivers were good for lifts, on a few occasions they stopped without being thumbed, one time I helped unload steel girders which was an effort, but he did a diversion to my home. Mostly they liked a bit of company as radios were hopeless and no other electronic media existed. The best memory is sitting on the back of a tar lorry on a sunny day going through the beautiful Slad valley towards Stroud ( late for art school).

The worst was being picked up and sitting in the open back of a lorry from Bodmin to Bristol. It started OK but i got colder and colder and prayed that the 2 other hikers in the cab were getting off soon. They did eventually but I was unwell for a few days.

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Had a strange attempt to get to Morocco. After taking ages to get to Paris and camping in the Bois de Boulogne we got stranded in a bleak bit of France in endless rain. Huddled under a big trailer. Opposite was a bar. We discovered that there was a lunatic asylum nearby and people were wary of giving lifts. We got very drunk on Pernod, made friends with an Algerian with a bullet hole in his head ( Franco Algerian war) got on a train and went home.I gave up hitching when I got a motorbike and sidecar, but I gave a lot of people lifts in that. Some liked it but some were terrified.

Traffic was much less and slower so people could pull in easily, also it was more accepted as less people could afford their own transport, so there was a sympathy factor. As wealth increased generosity seemed to decrease. There is also the fear factor which got worse. Being a couple increased chances of a lift . Sometimes if there were 2 males one would keep out of sight until a car stopped, but that was not always appreciated!

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There was a sad perverted farmer who gave my mate and me a lift in the middle of the night. He started to talk about when he was in the Army and about beatings etc. ....He offered to take us where we were hoping to go if we let him spank our bottoms. We made him let us get out and spent an icy night in a bus shelter.I have hitched a fair bit in this country and also in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Greece. We didn't always hitch, if the weather was bad we would do a bit on a bus or train if we had the money then hitch if we could.

Hitching Now: Face the traffic, hold your arm out with thumb up so you can be seen easily, a card with destination is a good idea, take your girlfriend with you or, if a girl, ask if they mind you phoning a friend telling the registration no. and where you are going, or just text so you can tell a dodgy driver what you have done if needs be (these hints were told me by a girl) , find a bit of road after a roundabout or junction and where a car can safely pull in, look tidy and smile!

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The following extract is taken from Peter Applebome’s article ‘The new dangers and decline in hitchhiking’ he discusses the possible reasons for the demise of a once hugely popular meth-od of travel.

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''Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything,'' Jack Kerouac wrote in ''On the Road,'' his classic 1950's paean to thumbing his way across America, and to lowlife joys of the road. ''Somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.'' If Mr. Kerouac tried to hitchhike across America today, he would probably be willing to trade the girls, visions and pearls for something much more valuable - a ride that would get him where he wanted to go.

For years hitchhiking was an amiable mix of utility and the romance of the road. Now it appears to be in decline across America, a victim of a widespread perception that life on the road is dangerous. ''People are too afraid to pick you up,'' said Billy McClusky, a 35-year-old itinerant bricklayer who tried for five hours to hitch a ride in the arid, barren stretches between here and El Paso until a reporter picked him up. He was near dehydration. He had been in the desert without water. Dingbats on the Highway ''They see a man on the road, and they think he's going to hurt someone,'' Mr. McClusky said.

''The sad thing is I can't really blame them,'' he added. ''There are a lot of dingbats along the highway these days.'' Hitchhiking is illegal or sharply restricted in most states. But law-enforcement officials, some of whom hitchhike themselves and others who used to, agree that there are fewer hitchhikers today and motorists are less likely to pick them up.

''I used to hitchhike myself in the 1960's and 1970's,'' said Alex Calica of the California Highway Patrol. ''Up until 1974 and 1975 you would see hitchhikers at the 'on' and 'off' ramps, but in my five years on the force, I've seen a marked decrease.'' Infraction in New York Lieut. Michael Wright, public information officer for the New York State Police in Albany, N.Y., agreed. ''Absolutely, there's been a decline,'' he said. ''There aren't nearly as many hitchhikers out there today as there were 10 years ago. We don't allow it at all on our highways. It's a traffic infraction, punished with a fine.''

‘’Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything,’’

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The main reason appears to be fear on the part of hitchhikers and motorists alike. A police officer was shot dead outside Houston last week after he stopped to question two hitchhikers about some burglaries. Several multiple killers such as Gerald Stano of Florida and William Bonin of California were convicted of murdering hitchikers they picked up.

Even among young people, hitchhiking themselves or picking up hitchhikers is generally viewed as excessively risky. One Is Now Less Trusting ''I see fewer and fewer

people out there, and it saddens me,'' he said. ''I see it as part of the closing up of American society. America has fewer and fewer places where people can get together in an unstructured place and talk to each other. The last hitchhiker I picked up

was a student from Germany who was seeing the country just the way he should see it.''

But Mr. Garrison said he did not think it was wise for women to hitchhike. A Hitchhiker’s Dream Stop Mr. McClusky, who said he has been hitchhiking since he was 14 years old, does not see much profound sociological virtue in hitchhiking. But since it is his main way of getting around, he would like to see its status improve. As such, like Holden Caulfield’s idea of being a catcher in the rye, he has a modest proposal.

‘’If I had a lot of money, I’ll tell you what I’d do,’’ he said as he took off his boots and relaxed in the car. ‘’I’d go to all the rest areas and set up a little place for hitchhikers where they could sit and wait for rides instead of being on the highway. Just a little house or shanty so people in the rest area could pick them up.’’ He was quiet for a moment, appreciating the car’s air-conditioning, watching the desert landscape whiz by. ‘’But then they’d probably mess it up,’’ he said. ‘’They usually do. People get something good happening and they’ll always mess it up.’’

“ I see fewer and fewer people out there and it saddens me”

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Till Lukat

Till is an illustrator from Berlin, who has done a lot hitchhiking around Europe. He has documented a number of trips through the form of his self illustrated comics.

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The first time I hitchhiked, well actually I did pretty much all of my hitchhiking with a friend mine from back home, his name is hanz, and we had just finished this little comic book that we wanted to sell in Hamburg, we didn’t know how to get to Hamburg, we had just finished it in the evening, so we had the comic and we needed to get there but it was like dark and everything, so Hanz was like lets just go now and hitchhike, so we didn’t know anything about hitchhiking but we were like lets just try it somehow, so he tried to find this spot on a hitchhiker website or something. We went to this spot and stood there and it was completely dark, there was a little light above us and we had little

sign, looking back the chances of us getting picked up were pretty slim, but we managed to get picked up. It was a really weird trip actually the first trip, the first guy who took us was one of those guys whose really keen to pick up hitchhikers, he just really wants to and it doesn’t really matter where hes going, he stopped and was just like yeah yeah get in the car, so he drove us 20 km in the right direction to hamburg and then 20 km in the wrong direction. So we ended up at this gas station, and it was this place where everyone was going to Poland pretty much, no one was going to hamburg, so we were sittin there and we just asked everyone who came by but they didn’t even speak any german or any English or nothing, they were mostly polish people who went straight to Poland, and then we met this guy and he was just really strange he wore this big plastic blue jacket and he was always spitting on the ground

and he had this English car, which is weird in Germany, because all of the wheels are on the other side, but he had a really neat sports car, so we asked him where he was going, and he says he doesn’t really know where hes going, and then he told us that he was awake for 24 hours already. And he had lost a shit load of money gambling already, but we were really desperate because we had been at this gas station for like 3 hours already, so we just went with him in the car and I was really paranoid because it was the first time I had been hitchhiking, we had been drinking rum at the gas station and I was wearing this big trench coat, and I had the empty rum bottle under my jacket, I was like if this guy is going to try anything im going to beat him down with the rum bottle. It was really strange, the whole trip he was like I don’t really know where im going, but we can check it on the map and see if its on my way, and then he was like yeah ok im going to drive you to hamburg, so we got into his car and started driving, and I was just waiting for the moment when he stopped in a field with us and was like ok I did you a favour now you do me a favour, but it didn’t happen he just drove us all the way to hamburg, which is like 300 kilometres, just for the sake of it.

When did you start hitchhiking?

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Do you think that’s one of the great things about hitchhiking, people going out of their way to do things for you?

Yeah yeah I think that’s definitely true, but what I actually really enjoy about hitchhiking is that you cant really say in the beginning where your gonna end up, you cant say tonight im gonna be there, because when im at home in berlin, im always really set in my timetable, this day im at university that day im at university, but everytime we hitchhiked, hanz would come over, and he would just be like ok were gonna leave now, and I would be like ok, and we would get our stuff together and just leave. I think it has taught me to be more relaxed and to not always take things so seriously. When im coming back from a hitchhiking trip im like ahh man back home you don’t really have to worry about anything, you have a place where you can sleep for the night, you aren’t going to go hungry, its something you should keep in mind, if you can deal with things that are really stressful when you are hitchhiking, then you can deal with things easier when your at home, so yeah that’s what I really like about hitchhiking.

Where have you hitchhiked

All of my trips have been in Europe, one time I hitched with my friend from the cote d’azurTo berlin and I hitchhiked alone from Bristol to Berlin, those were the two biggest trips that I did I guess. We did a lot of hitchhiking to hamburg and to Leipzig. But Leipzig for example is really easy, in Leipzig you just have to know where this gas station is and pretty much everyone is going in the right direction, some of my trips have been much harder than that.

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Have you noticed any difference between hitchhiking in England to hitchhiking in the rest of Europe?

Yeah definitely, on my way back through England when I hitched to berlin, In England it seems to be ok, but you do get to those points where no one will pick you up and you just cant move anywhere. You get the biggest assholes as well, people stopping and then driving away, people stopping asking hey do you want a job? And its like well no I don’t want a job I just want to get picked up. But then when I was in france it was really hard to get picked up by anyone at all, it took me like a day to get across this tiny little bit of france. It was a really shit day and the sun was burning hot, I had no water or nothing, and I was standing there with my sign, that had the name of some French city that I never knew how to pronounce, so I stood there for ages and then at some point I just turned the sign around and wrote ,its fuckin hot out here, and then at some point something really weird happened, this big holiday bus pulled over the side of the road, which never usually happens, It was 2 teachers and a school class,

one of the teachers spoke a little bit of English, I wasn’t really going the way that I expected to go, but I didn’t care because I was moving, at some point we got back to their school and the teacher took me out of the bus and said that he was going to drive me to a better spot to hitch from, and so he drove me to this layby down the road and I was so thankful that he drove me there.

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Do you prefer hitching alone or with a partner?

I really enjoy hitching with someone else, If you have someone with you, then you can get each other out of those shitty moods that you end up in sometimes. I think maybe because I have always hitched with someone from the start I just prefer having someone there. I think when there is a nice experience it gets even nicer if you have someone to share it with.

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What do you think the decline of hitchhiking means for society?

I think a lot of people desire a more set lifestyle nowadays, they just want things to their way, and to have no problems, they want their nice house and their job. I don’t really know how it got to this point with hitchhiking, now we are in this time where everyone just could do everything they want to, we are really free at this point but people aren’t taking that opportunity as much as they could do. Hitchhiking goes along with this whole thing because you cant say ‘im going to be here’ at a set time, your depending on other people, and a lot of people of our generation don’t want to be depending on people. I think with the rise of the internet people are exploring their own lives more than places, they aren’t going to the internet

to learn things they are going to it to explore their friends on facebook. I really do believe that hitchhiking would be something quite helpful for a lot of people, because you get people who are always stressed, always like ahh man ive got to find a job, ive got to work on my cv, but if you go on a hitchhiking trip, even its just for a couple of days, you experience things like, where am I going to sleep tonight? Or where am I going to get food? And it kind of puts things into perspective.

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What significance do you place on being able to meet people who you wouldn’t otherwise meet?

It’s a totally personal thing, its so different to like facebook, its kind of like picking up the phone and dialling the wrong number and all of a sudden youre connected to the wrong person and you have to speak to them for like an hour or two, you just have to find a topic to talk about. When I have been hitchhiking, once in a while you do meet some crappy people, who are assholes, but then for every asshole you meet you meet five people who are just really great. Theres two people who come to mind, this one time we were in France, there was this guy driving this really nice car and we were like, well hes never going to pick us up, but he did, he stopped and picked us up, and we were sitting in this nice air conditioned car with leather seats and we were smelling pretty bad at this point, but he was just like ‘yeah of course I took you in I take all hitchhikers’ so he dropped us at the gas station, but he was saying how he knew this place that did really good fish burgers and we should get one, but we said to him how we had ran out of money, so he just gave us twenty euros and said ‘if you can ever help anyone at any point then just do it” And then another time there was this woman who had had cancer at some point, she was really really nice, she had a picnic basket with her lunch in and she shared it with us, and she asked us to find out if we could give blood when we got home, so we did but unfortunately we wernt the right blood type to give the blood.

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Joe Samson Hill

where have you hitchhiked before?

I’ve hitchhiked properly once, me and my friend took part in a charity hitchiking race called Jailbreak, the other time was coming back from a party this bloke popped us in the back of his plastering van, pitchblack and drove us home at about 80 miles

Have you/ would you pick up

hitchhikers?

I have once, i picked up fat andy down the woods, he always walks in and out of town with his petrol can. I only picked him up once,

Do you ever really see hitchhikers?

yeah a bit, not much though. I’ve never seen many really.

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Why do you think this is?

Erm travels easier and cheap, i mean you can get the megeabus to london for 5 quid. I dont know... maybe people think we live in a more dangerous world, people think everyones a murderer or a rapist.

Do you wish you had been part of a generation where hitchiking was the norm?

Yeah definitely, its not really an option anymore, I think its a sad reflection on our culture nowadays that we are all quite selfish and paranoid.

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Finding Freedom

I wanted to see how easy it is to hitchhike today, I decided to try hitchhiking from near my hometown of Shrewsbury back down to Bristol. So I got a lif t of my mum to a service station on the M5 and waited for a lif t.

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Hiya mate im steve,

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I ended up only waiting for about 10 minutes and then got picked up by a guy called Steve who was driving down to Bristol to do some building work. I Have chosen some extracts from the conversation that we had on the way down.

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Ah don’t worry about it, its nice to have the company to be honest.

Hiya mate im steve

Hi, im jack, cheers for picking me up

Do you pick up a lot of hitchhikers?

Now and again I do, but not that often. You just don’t really see them anymore to be honest. I tell my wife that I don’t pick anybody up, because I tell her not too.I think everyones just quite scared of hitchhiking nowadays aren’t they, the drivers and the hitchers. You don’t know who your getting into a car with and people don’t like the idea of that anymore.

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What are you driving to Bristol for then?

Im just doing some building work on a school in Horfield, I can give you a lift to gloucester road if that’s useful to you by the way?

Yeah that would be great cheers.

Yeah I run me own building company, were installing a lot of them mobile classrooms in schools at the moment, Ive got 2 lads working for me, but theyre classed as self employed because I cant afford the risk of them not turning up and still having to pay them. They get a good wage that way as well, much better than a lot of people their age, the problem is that the minimum wage is too low what is it for you like 6.50 or something?

6.30 I think

6.30, its ridiculous no wonder you get people to lazy to work when theyre getting paid that low.

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Have you seen David Moyes has been sacked? I knew he had to go soon, it’s been a terrible season for him hasn’t it. Theyre getting giggs in as interim manager I reckon that’ll be much better for them.

Yeah he looked shit from the start really didn’t he, always been out of his depth.

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Do you follow football

Not really too avidly to be honest, one of the lads who works for me, ryan, hes a big city fan so I follow them a bit. Im more of a golf man really. Yeah Ive played for about 20 years now, got a handicap of +6 at the moment, I want to bring it down a couple before I finish playing. I just love the social side of it, most of my friends now are from golf.

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Slugging, also known as casual carpooling, is the practice of forming ad hoc, informal carpools for purposes of commuting, essentially a variation of ride-share commuting and hitchhiking. Typically slugging is motivated by an incentive such as a faster HOV lane or a toll reduction. While the practice is most common and most publicized in the congested Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, slugging also occurs in San Francisco, Houston, and other cities.

Slugging might be a window into the future for hitchhiking, a take on the traditonal form of hitchhiking but with an added incentive for the driver.

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Every morning, these commuters meet in park-and-ride lots along the interstate in northern Virginia. They then ride, often in silence, without exchanging so much as first names, obeying rules of etiquette but having no formal organization. No money changes hands, although the motive is hardly altruistic. Each person benefits in pursuit of a selfish goal: For the passenger, it’s a free ride; for the driver, a pass to the HOV lane, and both get a faster trip than they would otherwise. Even society reaps rewards, as thousands of cars come off the highway. “To me,” marvels Oliphant, a facilities planner with the Navy, “it’s an illustration of the ideal for government.”

He’s drawn to slugging as a creative vision that would begin to ease the eternal mess of urban gridlock. Society always reaches first for the infrastructure fix — the costly highway expansion, the new route for the metro rail. But what if government could just nudge more people to do what they’ve done here, creating their own commuting cure within the existing system? Federal Highway Administration studies suggest that free-flowing traffic can be restored on a clogged highway simply by removing 10 percent of its cars.

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Hitchhiking has become more and more involved with the internet, with sites connecting people to hitchhiking spots and also sites where people can arrange to pay for lifts becoming more and more popular.

I remember the exact moment that it became obvious to me that the very essence of hitchhiking had been transformed by technology. It came as we were thundering along the autoroute in the south of France. Not one moment of this long day on the road had been spent in the traditional hitching pose: waving signs or thumbs at passing motorists. Instead, I had spent a very pleasant morning back in Barcelona, using the latest generation of hitching apps and websites to set up an itinerary of interconnecting rides. All I had to do was show up and hop in.

Now, with dusk descending, I still hadn't found anywhere to stay, despite sending out innumerable requests through websites that connect travellers to kindly folk with floorspace or a couch to spare. Then I noticed an icon blinking on my phone. "Hi, this is Emilie in Nice," read the message. "I'm happy to host you! Call when you get into town.'' A second message followed: "Hi John, I'm Karina, Emilie's flatmate. We're planning a picnic on the beach tonight. Perhaps you can come …" In an instant, I'd gone from wandering hobo to homecoming friend, thanks to the latest online travel innovations. It certainly wasn't always like this. In the analogue 1980s, I took a year off college to hitch around Europe in search of adventure and enlightenment. Back then, not only did this involve excruciating hours by the roadside, it was also downright dangerous, with risks ranging from crotch lunges – of which I recall a few – all the way to serial killers. Now, rides are simply posted on sites such as BlaBlaCar.com, Carpooling.com and hitchhikers.org, as well as smartphone apps such as iThumb and Rideshare4less. On Twitter, they're found using hashtags #hitchhike, #rideshare and #autostop. Hitchers book

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a place, or post notices saying where they want to go from and to. In return, all that's expected is a modest contribution to petrol costs, or sometimes merely company. More importantly, drivers can be checked in advance via profiles or reviews from other hitchers – making this sort of travel much safer than it used to be. After a period of decline in hitchhiking, the net is fuelling its resurgence. So I downloaded Jack Kerouac's On the Road to my Kindle to keep me company and hit the highways, hoping to either recreate my earlier trip in a digital age, or just follow where the motorways – and websites – took me. For my maiden voyage, I settled on a ride from London to Paris, offered on BlaBlaCar by a debonair Parisian named Jean K, who, according to reviews, was de confiance (trustworthy).

As I waited with my luggage at the rendezvous point – which Jean insisted on calling "Gare de Lewisham" – I remained unconvinced that the concept would actually work. But bang on time, up rocked Jean in his Citroën C4 and we were soon blazing (as fast as a C4 can blaze) through lush French landscapes, with Bob Marley pumping from the stereo. From Paris, my plan was to head towards the Atlantic coast then head south. My first ride on this leg, via Nantes to the village of Puybelliard in the Vendée region, was a rather more soulless

affair. Then came my first no-show. "Annulé, annulé!" the driver barked unhelpfully when I called. I had to revert to traditional methods. An improvised cardboard sign, scrawled with "La Rochelle, SVP" worked its magic on a trucker named Olivier and I was soon rolling into this sophisticated old port, perched vertiginously in the cockpit of the 18-wheel juggernaut. Then – in one 343km leap – I was in Bayonne, a shuttered, half-timbered, riverfront town within easy hitching distance

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along the coast of the swish resorts of Biarritz and St-Jean-de-Luz. By now weary of motorways, I was pleased to find online a ride over the Pyrenees to Barcelona, bearing a little blue autoroute icon with a strike-through – meaning that it would mostly be on precipitous B-roads.

The driver, who arrived in an explosion of laughter and messy blond hair, was an irrepressible force of nature who went by the name of Eglantine. On the run after some romantic disaster in Paris, she had spent three weeks criss-crossing Europe, staying in squats, on floors and, the previous night, in a field – information she imparted in one heavily accented stream of consciousness in the first few minutes of the journey.Once in the mountains, we were immediately careering along slivers of swerving tarmac under a crystal-blue sky. As we crossed the border along the Pas d'Aspe – barely a crevice in the jagged peaks – I looked up to see, hovering above, the turrets of a chateau that appeared to have been carved into the rock. We hurtled into Barcelona at speeds that should have torn Eglantine's juddering Peugeot 205 apart. This had definitely been my most exhilarating lift so far.

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Hitchhiking is something that I believe is hugely important to our society. During the course of making this book, speaking to people involved with hitchhiking and reading texts about the subject has solidified this view for me. Hopefully this book can make more people think about trying hitchhiking in the future.

Finding Freedom

This book is exploring the process of hitchhiking. Looking at the reasons that people take part in it and how it has changed from its origins to today.