I was listening to Steve Earle's new live CD and he had a little story on there about one of his hitchhiking trips back to his hometown.  I was curious to see if anybody out on this lovely board had any good hitchiking tales, here is mine.

Back in 1987 I went home to Montana for a 3 week leave from the Army.  After arriving in my hometown and hanging out for a couple of days having the time of my life, my buddy and I decided to head up to far northern Idaho to visit one of our old pals.  He lived by himself in a house on the side of a mountain.  The house was half greenhouse, half living quarters.  At one time it was occupied by his sisters, mother and father, but that had all changed.  You see his dad was arrested for growing massive amounts of weed and was doing time in the state pen.  His mom and sisters had moved down near the prison to be near him, thus leaving the house to the lone son.  He did seasonal work to make ends meet, which included picking  Huckleberries to sell at the farmers market.  He invited us up for a couple of days to hang with him, pick some hucks, swim, hike, drink, the usual rocky mountain entertainment.  This all sounded great but unfortunately we had no wheels.  The total journey was about 200 miles so we decided what the hell, lets thumb it.  We walked outside of town and headed down the side of the highway.  Within 15 minutes we were picked up by a guy in his mid-forties driving a beat up car.  We jumped on in and started down the road.  Within a half hour he was pulling out a huge joint, telling  us stories and being an all around great guy.  He smoked another one with us, drove us all the way to Thompson Falls, then went on his way.  We we stumbled out of his car and  repostitioned ourselves on the side of the road and were picked up promptly by another kind soul, the wait again was only a few minutes.  This guy was  about 70 years of age and had a twelve pack of Raineer beer in his truck.  He quickly offered us a beer, then another, then another.  He took us right up to the dirt road that led to our friends place and dropped us off.  By this time we were stoned, drunk and within a 20 minute walk of our destination.  We had managed to travel 200 miles in less than 4 hours, all by the power of the thumb.  Makes me smile just thinking about it.

Peace..

Robert