Anyone ever done it? What was your experience? Any tips? I've signed up to do a competition to get as far away as possible in 56 hours by hitchhiking (it's been running for years). I know the advice of some might be not to do as i'll end up being gruesomely murdered or something, but I wonder if that reflects the current climate of being suspicious of strangers. I am hitchhiking with a male for safety reasons though as obviously i don't want to go to the other end and expect every stranger to be lovely and harmless.
I used to hitchhike all the time before i got my licence. This is going to sound bad, but well, because I’m a bloke i thought it was okay. I don't know if i was a women....maybe if i was one with a bunch of women I was lucky when i did because i used to travel up the coast (over 500 miles) most times i'd do the whole distance with one or two people max (as i used to do it holiday time and id catch the interstate going home). I always though as the hitchhiker you had to do the talking. You know to "pay" for the ride. But no most times the person picking me up would be very curious about why i was doing this and ask hundreds of questions. (Which at first scared me, but i realised if anyone was going to be picking me up, then they would be risk takers in the first place). Truck drivers used to ALWAYS help hitchhikers, no matter what. And back when i was younger i knew to trust them...sadly with a OH&S controlled world i don’t think they would anymore....unless you were maybe a women (Truckers are friendly helpful people, or most of then anyway). The most odd moment was when someone picked me up and it was some father on his way home and he said he could take me 20 miles. I thought no, but he insisted. Then i got in the car and there were two small girls, maybe under ten and they looked scared. So after about 2 minutes i had to tell him to let me out. It was too wrong .....odd. Also, it was always blokes who picked me up (being a bloke). I always k ew if some crap was going to happen I could handle myself (thus is what I thought as a teenager of course).
I only did it once, as a young single female. I was being given a lift home from work by a friend's husband who stopped halfway at a pub and had a lot to drink. I refused to get back in the car with a drunk driver so I reckoned the odds of staying unharmed were slightly better if I hitched. I had a lift from a lorry driver who was lovely but I wouldn't do it again unless the alternative was riskier.
