After my interview in Colorado I needed to get back to San Diego. I was tired of being on the road, living out of a backpack, and sleeping at friend’s houses. I had really wanted to hop a freight train but an interview in California early the next week deterred me. Plane tickets had jumped substantially in price and there weren’t any Craigslist Rideshares headed to San Diego anytime soon. I figured I could rent a car and drive it out, probably pick up some ridesharers on the way, but I’m so tired of that drive and I wanted an adventure if I was going to be travelling. So I stuck out my thumb.
I didn’t know what to expect – I have hitch hiked to go skiing a bunch in Colorado, and made it all the way to Moab Utah for a bike race once. I had hitch hiked 1400 miles in Patagonia and just recently used my thumb to get around Colombia. But Denver to San Diego was intimidating.
I got dropped off in Golden, Colorado by a friend heading for a bike ride. People rarely know what to think when they drop me off on a highway ramp, so she wished me luck and said she’d pick me up again if I wasn’t gone by the end of her ride. It was less than 5 minutes before two kids in their late teens picked me up and I was on my way!
They dropped me in Evergreen where I grabbed a ride to Idaho Springs, then on to Dillon, and a good ride to Grand Junction. Walking to the on ramp in Grand Junction I saw something I had never seen before which hitch hiking – another hitch hiker. It was a little awkward but we introduced ourselves, his name was Emilio, and found that we were both guys in our mid twenties, fairly normal, and out for an adventure. He was headed home to Tahoe after hitching around the mountains of Utah and Colorado, meeting up with friends, and having an adventurous summer. We talked for a bit about getting and giving rides, the adventure and dying art of hitching, and the people we met along the way while trading off thumb duties. Eventually I got tired of the infrequent traffic and walked up to the highway. One car stopped to give us a bottle of water but no ride, and finally I saw a truck stop for him at the bottom of the ramp. While he was getting in that I got picked up by the very next pickup that came by. He caught up and since my ride was going further Emilio hopped in with me and our driver, an older Latino man stoked on his vintage Chevy. Our new friend told us about driving long distance trucks in Mexico, avoiding English classes as a kid, and some fling he was on his way to see. Somehow jobs came up in conversation and I told him I did international sales for a bicycle company before being laid off. “Oh, an easy job,” was his non-judgmental response. I explained that in the economy it was difficult to move some inventory, and different languages and time zones and customs and all that before thinking to ask what he did. He’s a coal miner, underground, at the age of at least 50. Oh. By comparison then, yes, an easy job.
We got to Salina around sunset and started asking at the gas stations for a ride. Emilio found one going directly to Tahoe but I wasn’t having as much luck. I’ve never been terribly lucky at gas stations so I walked to the highway again and put my thumb out. No one was picking me up. Finally as it started to get really dark I went back to the gas station.
I found a ride from an old hippie with a Bible on the dashboard of his new Saturn Vue. He bought the car for his sister and was going to give it to her in a year as long as she made it through her parole. We creeped along hitting a low point at 55mph for no reason other than he wasn’t paying attention. Ironically he wasn’t paying attention to how fast he was going because he was too busy telling me how much of a hurry he was in to get to Jerry Garcia Day in San Francisco the next day. I thought about mentioning that driving 20mph below the speed limit probably wasn’t a good strategy for making up time but I let it pass. He drove me to literally the next gas station, but in that part of Utah the next gas station is 110 miles away.
No comments:
Post a Comment