August 18th: On The Road in Georgia and The Carolinas

On August 18th 1976 I was hitching north through Georgia and South Carolina.  I was spending a few weeks in the USA after flying in from Ecuador.

Two days earlier the plane had crossed the Caribbean islands and banked round Miami just missing a tropical storm.  There was a long wait for immigration and the man in customs gave me a good going over; I guess he thought a longhair with a beard coming from South America might produce something, but he did it with good humour.  I didn't feel like taking a bus downtown and, seeing on a map that the airport was to the north of the city, I just walked out of the airport and put out my thumb amidst the bright reds of the sunset.  Three lifts took me to Daytona for about 4 in the morning and I curled up for a rest.

The next day was hard going with very little progress.  I had a couple of lifts early on which took me to the Flagler Beach area, but then I got stuck.  I spent much of the day near a petrol station where I could get something to drink.  It was very hot and humid after the high, thin air of the Andes.  There were other hitchers too and that made things more difficult.   The cops were keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn't go up on the freeway.  In the end I got a lift to Jacksonville from a man who kept telling me that he didn't want to give me a lift.  It was now the late afternoon and the next ride offered to put me up at his home in Jacksonville; I gladly accepted and I caught up on a bit of sleep that night.

In the morning I made a reasonably early start in the middle of rush-hour, and I got a lift out of the central area of Jacksonville.  But then there was another wait and I felt the previous day's pattern emerging again.  I went into a truck stop for a second breakfast and got talking with some freak truckers heading for North Carolina.  They took me through the Georgia swamps and then we stopped all afternoon at a riverside just short of Savannah.  I had a swim and heard some heavy truckers' stories, watched people diving off a bridge and talked with the Georgian kids.  Then there was a catfish supper and peach pie and beer and I felt better.  We began the journey north at about eight when it got dark and the mosquitoes came out.  We passed through the old part of Savannah, with its old large wooden buildings, because they wanted to give me a tourist's view.  I fell asleep as we entered South Carolina. 

I awoke for the last time as it got light and we were entering North Carolina.  They tried to get me a lift on their CB radio, but this failed and they put me down near their home town of High Point.  I got a few lifts from black drivers to get me past Greensboro and then it was easy to get on to Durham where a friend I'd met the year before in Ecuador had invited me to stay.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, 2008:  Picture by numbphoto,  CC

After a week in North Carolina another friend drove me to stay the night in his parents' house on the edge of the mountains in Mount Airy.  We spent the evening sitting on the front porch having stilted conversations and my friend's father showed me his gun which he carried at all times.  I slept in an antique bed in the hundred year-old house surrounded by wonderful woodwork.  In the morning my friend drove me up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway as far as Roanoke.   I enjoyed the views from the hills when the mist cleared.  I appreciated the trees and the flowers and the way the road had been landscaped - a planned environment.  Getting a lift was easy, first just a few miles with a guy in a VW then with a friendly guy to Natural Bridge.  There I had my longest wait, maybe 20 minutes, during which I went on the freeway, and got a lift right out of the mountains and round the DC Beltway.  Then there was a final ride from a longhair in an old Citroen DS all the way up the New Jersey Turnpike.  He took me right into Manhattan around midnight to Broadway and 80th and I walked to the place that had been arranged for me to stay in.

I stayed with my friends in New York City for two weeks while I waited for a flight back to the UK.  Finally a cheap Loftleider plane took me via Reykjavik to Luxembourg.  I got back home on the overnight ferry from Ostend and stayed with friends in Oxford as the long hot summer of 1976 drew to its slowly drawn out close.

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July 25th: Tijuana

On July 25th 1975 I was in Tijuana in Mexico.  I had just finished the process of hitching from Northern New Hampshire into Mexico.

Parts of this journey:    New Hampshire to Denver.    Denver to Monterey.    Monterey to Tijuana.

From Monterey I got a lift early in the morning to the Big Sur area.  I camped quite near the road in a site which seemed to be for hitchers and cheap travellers; someone was supposed to come and get a fee but they never came, and there was a water-tank with a painted sign which said "Danger: do not drink - this water comes from LA.".  I spent the days on the beach, which was a hike away, or on short trails in the forests.  The evenings I spent talking around fires with the other camper: these included a long haired blonde guy who had been shot at while cycling across Texas with his dog on his way to California, and a strange fellow who talked about his time living on the Manson ranch.  Eventually I got a lift from a couple to Venice Beach, just to the north of Los Angeles and spent a few days with their friends in a little wooden house just behind the beach, a suitably bohemian place for young men who were into booze, Kerouac and Henry Miller.  They showed me the sights, Hollywood Boulevard and so on, and we spent time on the beach.

A few days later I walked up Venice Boulevard and spent a long slow day hitching around Los Angeles, not an easy place for hitch-hikers.  After three short lifts in several hours, I got picked up by a young Canadian doctor working in Irvine.  He took me to his house, wife and baby.  They looked upon Southern California as if it were a fantasy land and they were outsiders.  They saw me as fellow outsider, sympathetic to the cause, not hard.  They fed me well and gave me a tour, to Laguna Beach and other spots; we went to a beach for an open Jacuzzi in the evening to give me the Orange County experience. 

Border near Tijuana:  Picture by Kalavinka,  CC

I had difficulty the next day starting to hitch, these two days the hardest I had.  I only really got started when I risked going up on the freeway.  The second lift took me further, from a gay Chicano and his older (say 25) Mexican boyfriend who kept on going on about his wife and how bisexual he was, and how I might fit into the scene.  They were driving to Tijuana to get an upholstery job on their beat-up Volkswagen.  In Tijuana they wanted to show me the sights, but I wasn't too keen on that, so they took me to the bus-station.  It was four hours until the next bus south, so they drove round the dirt streets a few blocks behind the main drag until they found a hairdressers where they discussed the styles and chatted up the girls and discussed how beautiful they would look.  I left when I had had enough.

It was a good bus, air-conditioned and I had a seat up front.  In the evening we had driven to the top of a huge canyon, all lit up by the moon which was just rising, huge shadows all around;  the moon seemed to be far below where I was looking from.  At midnight we pulled into a big city of wide avenues and low houses, Mexicali, and the temperature was forty-one degrees centigrade according to the signs.  Later in the night there was a long delay for a sort of immigration.  In the morning I woke up in a landscape of bare earth and cactus, mile after mile after mile of it.  Now I knew I was in Mexico.

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July 17th: Monterey in California

On July17th 1975 I was in Monterey in California.  I was in the process of hitching from Northern New Hampshire into Mexico.

Parts of this journey:    New Hampshire to Denver.    Denver to Monterey.       Monterey to Tijuana.

It took me only 3 or 4 days to cover the 2000 miles to Denver, but three or four weeks for the 2000 miles to the Mexican border, as I took a more rural route and stopped as I went along.

Mosquito Pass:  Picture by Nick Taylor,  CC

After crossing from New Hampshire, I met up with my sister in Denver and spent a couple of days with her and her friends in their cabin near Bailey, to the south-west of the city, at about 9000 feet in the Rockies.  I remember good walks through purple-tinged slopes and I learned to throw horseshoes.  Eventually they dropped me off on a main road in the mountains and a hiker took me on further.  Then a young couple in a 4WD took me to Leadville, which involved driving across the Mosquito Pass (13188 feet I noted), one of the highest passes in the States.  A school teacher took me on to Poncha Springs where I ate in a truck stop.  An Indian guy with a white girl took me up a bit of Poncha Pass but they weren't going far so I decided to stop and camp in the woods.  Unfortunately it rained most of the night and I emerged damp in the morning as men passed by going fishing.  My first lift that day was from a camper going over the top of the pass, and then two young women on their way to Arizona took me over Wolf Creek Pass all the way to Durango.  Tired and still wet, I needed a couple of days of peace without talking to people, so I checked into the Central Hotel, which was cheap enough.  It seemed just like an old fashioned cheap hotel in Greece and sure enough the owner or manageress was from Kalamata in Greece.

Mesa Verde:  Picture by Crazy Monk,  CC

Rested, I found a couple of lifts west before Lenny and Judy picked me up in their VW camper and I stayed with them for two days.  They took me into the Mesa Verde National Park, for a drive around the canyon, and we stopped to see the Pueblo Cliff Palace and some other ruins.  We drove on to Cortez for shopping and then into Utah to camp in the Manti-La Sal Forest.  I slept in the van, while they used their tent in the thundery, rainy weather.  The next day we continued north-west through the canyon lands and deserts of Utah, beautiful wild country and I drove most of the way, enjoying my fortune at being able to drive in this craggy, eroded world.  We camped again when the country got more forested in Uinta National Forest and they dropped me off by the freeway in Salt Lake City.

A couple of lifts took me to the Tooele turning near the Great Salt Lake, and then a guy took me in his sports car at a steady 100 mph all the way over the salt flats to the Nevada border and Wendover where he was going to try his luck at the casino.  I had a hamburger there and then a lift to Reno from a well-digger who had just driven to somewhere on the east coast and had to come straight back to the west because his mother was seriously ill.  He asked me if I could drive before he asked me where I was headed.  He was pretty far gone and had a bottle on the front seat to keep him awake, he said, and I tried to drive as much as I could.  I went through hills and scrub on a wide winding road, while storms kept passing, until the darkness fell and eventually we came to Reno.  He drove me down the strip where the lights seemed bizarre after coming in from the desert past midnight.  He let me off at the first turning out of town. 

I took some rest in the warm Nevada air but it got colder around 4, so I started hitching again.  I got a lift about 6 in a pickup to Vellejo, through lovely country in the Sierra, the Truckee River and a descent past lakes and forest and across the plain by Sacramento.  A final lift took me to Golden Gate Park.  I had a contact in San Francisco who let me stay, but left me to my own devices largely.  I wandered the streets and Telegraph Hill, ate in Chinatown, bought a book in City Lights, but it was a fairly solitary experience, unusual for this trip in America.  In the end I left in the afternoon and hitched in four lifts to Greyhound Rock, near Santa Cruz.  My final lift pointed out a good place to camp beneath a Monterey Pine on the beach, where I could watch the pelicans.  The next day was very slow around Monterey Bay, with a series of short lifts through Castroville, the "artichoke capital of the world."  At Monterey there was a long wait and I began to walk down the road as the fog came in.  I pushed a car to a gas station and the driver took me 15 miles on.  I walked down to the beach but found the only cave occupied; I shared a bottle of vodka with the occupants and walked back to the road and sheltered under a tree.

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June 30th: Interstate 80, USA

On June 30th 1975 I was hitching west on Interstate 80.  It took me four days and three nights to get from Northern New Hampshire to Denver, over two thousand miles.  I wrote some notes on the journey when I got to Denver and what follows is adapted from them.

28/6:  Walking out from the campsite I got my first lift over the Kancamagus Pass from a couple in an MG1100.  Then Pete, who had offered me company on the campground the night before, spotted me and took me just past his home and put me on the Mass Turnpike at Palmer, over 200 miles south.  The next lift was to Springfield from a guy in a Pinto.  Then came the long wait.  There were several other hitchers trying to get to the Tanglewood Festival at Lenox and for some reason I was the last to be picked up.  I even tried a motel which I could see from the freeway but was turned down.  Finally I got a lift from an engineer who was working on a computerised submarine (possibly Trident) going to the Lee turning.  I got off at the service area before Lee, quite close to where I had started hitching on my way north to New Hampshire.   Just before dark I found a lift going to Buffalo in Eric and Mike's converted mail van.

29/6:  I got some sleep on the back shelf of the van but not a lot and the van went fairly slowly.  Some time in the night the battery went flat and we stopped once more.   I looked up and a catholic priest was looking in at me, recognising my accent as British (just about the only person in the US who did.)  He put his shoulder to the rear end of the van and helped us get going again somewhere near Rochester.  We had breakfast around dawn and they dropped me in full daylight near a toll booth.  Another lift took me to another service area where I waited until 11.  While I was there, a man got off a tour bus, put up a tripod and started taking photographs of me; he asked me to put out my thumb to make his pictures more realistic.   Finally I got a long lift to Chicago from a young woman, and her two dogs, on their way to Montana.  We passed along Lake Erie; I did a lot of the driving through Ohio and Indiana and it went well.  When she dropped me off in the late afternoon I had a long wait at a Howard Johnson Oasis; there I met a fellow hitch-hiker, Ernie the Jesus preacher, short and long-bearded, a professional bum.  Together we had a bowl of chilli, the recommended cheap food, and together we accepted a lift for a few miles from a high school teacher.  The entrance ramp was hopeless so we went up in the darkness to the highway itself, but the huge roaring trucks just drove past.

30/6:  Some time in the night we were joined by another hitch-hiker, a younger drifter and a long wait ensued.  I realised I'd made mistakes accepting a short ride and trying to hitch with someone else, so I determined to go solo.  The new drifter certainly made things more difficult: he would veer out in front of the trucks so that they had to swerve mildly to avoid him, and when he couldn't get a ride our way he started hitching in the other direction.  I walked on a bit to get by myself and then slept a little beside the highway.  Sometime after 4am I got a lift from an early morning worker going to Seneca, Illinois.  I stood by the freeway at dawn in rural Illinois, with fields of corn and little towns as far as the eye can see and the mind can imagine, waiting for the sun to bring a little warmth and clear the dew.  A flock of red-winged blackbirds went up from the edge of a pond I hadn't noticed and there hadn't been a car or a truck going either way for half an hour.  Finally a high school student on his way to camp rescued me.  Another lift from a motorcycle dealer who had been in Europe took me to Quad Cities.  Then Tom and Annie, his lift-share, picked me up and they were going to Denver.  We decided to take a motel in Des Moines, Iowa, and they chose the Holiday Inn.  We drank coke and brandy and I slept for six hours through the afternoon.  We had some food in McDonalds started driving after about 11pm.

1/7:  After 1 in the morning I did most of the driving.  In the early hours we stopped for coffee and a stack at a truck stop.  It got light when Nebraska was very unpopulated and it was very pretty with the Platte River on our left among trees; to the right were fields of cattle or wheat.  Tom slept and Annie kept me awake.  We turned off for another truck stop at North Platte, a frontier town, all truckers and cowboy hats.  On I drove into Colorado, massive plains of tumbleweed and black-eyed Suzies; it felt like Western Asia, the cultivation depending on water sprayers.  There was very little else until the magic moment when we could make out the hint of the huge mountains across the skyline in front,  and then Denver was close.  Annie asked me to crash at her place and Tom drove on to Vail.  We went to buy steak and broccoli and a bottle of wine; we ate and drank.  I fell asleep at 5.30 and slept undisturbed until 8.30 the next morning.

The next part of the journey is here.

Interstate 80 in Nebraska, 2008:  Picture by Spencer,  CC

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June 25th: Mount Paugus in Northern New Hampshire

On June 25th 1975 I was on Mount Paugus in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  I had hitched north from Massachusetts a couple of days previously, going further north through the mountains as far as Littleton and then back down to Intervale, where I was put up by a student doing temporary work with the National Forest. 

I had determined that I was going to get out into some of this country, so in the morning I went shopping in North Conway and bought a pair of cheap hiking boots, a plastic poncho and a Eureka nylon tent, total cost perhaps $50.  The camping shop also had a simple trail map of the area.  Then I bought some trail groceries, granola and raisins, chocolate and so on and hitched down on to the Kancamagus Highway to the west.  I found the beginning of the Bolles Trail and walked up past pretty brooks.  Then I had a long climb and a sharp descent to a crossroads where I camped.  I had seen no one else since leaving the highway.  I was tired which was not surprising as I was carrying my full rucksack with necessities for a year away.  I was also learning that I'd have to put up with black flies as well as mosquitoes. In the night I was disturbed by some animals - racoons possibly, though I was concerned about bears.

The next day I was on trails all day:  I didn't cover so much ground but it was pretty tiring.  First I went up the Beeline Trail, away from the brooks and thicker forest now that I was getting higher.  I went up Mount Paugus  by the steep Old Paugus Trail, a very beautiful climb through pines with a pretty view from a bluff.  I had a lunch break at the Old Shag Camp and and then walked up to the summit at 3200 feet.  There I enjoyed the view and met my first human being of the day, a hiker from Massachusetts.  I went back a different way, firstly down the steep Lawrence Trail where I met the only other people of the hike, a bearded man with four or five school children.  Now I had to get along a difficult ledge, where my pack seemed very much in the way, before a steep descent to easier lower ground.  I camped right on the trail at a good point, where I was back in the thicker broadleaved forest and running streams.  Again I was woken in the night, perhaps by deer this time. 

In the morning it was an easy walk along the Oliverian Brook back to the highway.  I stopped at a place where there were big boulders on the stream.  A short walk and a short lift took me to the Passaconaway Campground.  There I talked with the Chief Ranger, the boss of my host in Intervale.    I pitched my tent, gratefully putting my pack inside, and left to hitch into Conway.  A hamburger filled my stomach, I bought some groceries and hitched back to the campsite.  In the evening I wrote my brief notes surrounded by squirrels and chipmunks, and lots of birds,  which fascinated me at the time as they were all different species to what I'd seen before in Europe and Asia.  The mosquitoes and black flies had made my back a mess.

Next day I took an afternoon stroll up Mount Potash: it was lower, closer to the road and I didn't have my pack and I found the walk easy.  In the evening I was asked to join the family who were my neighbours for their evening meal of fresh fish.  We drank coffee and talked into the night over the campfire.

The next day I started hitching west to California, but first I had to get back south.

Brook in White Mountains:  Picture by Sean Munson, CC

White Mountains View:  Picture by LucienTj, CC

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June 12th: New York City

On June 12th 1975 I was in New York City. 

I flew into Kennedy in the rain, on a British Airways flight from London.  I had arranged to stay with friends of a friend on the Upper West Side.  I stood in line outside the airport trying to get on the crowded buses going downtown.  I did something against etiquette, perhaps moving my pack, and the driver told me "I don't do your job, why don't you let me do mine?"   The bus put me down outside Grand Central Station and I stood in the early evening light trying to flag down a yellow cab.  Many were empty but they paid no attention to me with my pack, though they stopped for others.  This, I thought, was the time to tackle the subway, even though I'd been travelling for twelve hours.  I got out at Broadway and 96th and was amazed at all the colourful characters hanging out on the street.  I was made welcome in the apartment and ate and drank and talked long into the night.

The next day, still spaced out from the flight, I walked through Central Park where I looked at the blue jays and the cops cruising.  I made my way down to Washington Square, where people talked to you like you actually existed, so different from stony London.  I ran into someone who had been on my flight.  I took a meal at Horne and Hardart.  In the following days I walked a lot, and saw some sights, Grant's Tomb, The Natural History Museum, The Staten Island Ferry.  I went to lots of art with my hostess who was an artist, in SoHo and at the museums.  I went with my hosts round Brooklyn and ate clams and steamers and mussels with beer around Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach.  We went to visit friends in huge loft apartments and drove around the city streets which were in a deadly state of repair.  I saw Altman's Nashville in its opening week (it didn't open in London until September).  We went to a black middle-class jazz bar in mid-town.  I felt like I was in the centre of everything, everybody was interested in anything and everything, and they even listened to what I had to say as I listened to them.

In my mind this was to be the beginning of a grand journey.  I'd had difficulty filling in the forms on the flight because they asked about where I was going and which flight I was going to take back to the UK.  But I wasn't going to use my return ticket.  I was going to hitchhike across to California and I was going to go to Cuzco and La Paz which sounded so high and far away when I read my Latin American Handbook (my only preparation), and most of the bus journeys appeared to take twenty-four hours.

By Central Park, 1976:  Picture by Paul W, CC