Been re-reading The Canada Chronicles by Matthew Jackson recently, which is an account of some guy’s hitchhiking adventures over a four year period in the 90s in my country. Fun read, made me wonder if anyone here as any stories they want to share (will also accept shout outs for someone else’s cool hitchhiking story).
I hitchhiked a fair amount in Ontario, Quebec and Michigan in the 90’s.
Loads of fun. Nothing bad ever happened, but some fun stories and close calls on the US side.
Since there’s nothing better than a close call story, are there any you’d like to share? Feel free to balance it out with one of the fun stories as well if you want (since close call stories, as well as sheer bad outcome stories, colour a lot people’s impressions about hitching).
One of the more memorable ones was crossing Windsor to Detroit. After paying $2 to take a shuttlebus across as no pedestrians were allowed. Once we got to the downtown Detroit side we knew we would have a hard time getting a ride. We thought we’d look for a city bus to take us to a hitchhiker friendly highway. It was sundown, and you could literally see the junkies and nightlife crawling out of every nook and cranny like a bad zombie movie as the sun set. We went into a gas station for a map or directions. The gas station attendant freaked the fuck out at our presence.
He yelled at us " You guys are going to get robbed or killed just for your backpacks. You won’t last 20 minutes walking around like that. It’s getting dark and the crazies come out at night. You have to get the fuck out of here now! There is a greyhound station 2 blocks north, 1 block east. Get the fuck out of Detroit while you still can. Go now now now!"
Our faces went dead serious. We said thanks, confirmed direction by pointing and ran. Well as “run” as you can do with an 80L camping backpack. As we did, the orange glow over the city got dimmer and sundown turned to twilight, we saw the most concentrated group of unfortunates, and we were drawing attention. We heard catcalls and the like directed towards us. Yelling. A fight of somekind and gunshots or a car backfiring. We don’t know because we power-walked like olympians on meth.
We got to the greyhound and found a bus leaving in our direction for something cheap $12 that got us to Ann Arbor. We temporarily lost our taste for adventure. Our American friends during our visit to UofM suggested we do the same thing backwards to avoid dying. They concluded that we were book smart, but not very street smart for a couple of hitchhikers. We agreed.
As for fun, a different friend and I were hitchhiking in Northern Quebec near Ville-Marie and met two lovely Quebec girls from Montreal doing the same thing as us. We saw each other at a greasy spoon getting some warmth and hot coffee after a cool night in the woods and our backpacks identified the four of us as compatriots. We just smiled and waved to our intrepid fellow travellers.
We met again a little later trying to hitch rides in the opposite directions. After waiting for a while with no cars offering and little traffic, we crossed the road to chat. Turns out they were lovely people from Université de Laval, looking for adventure on the cheap like we were. We all got along so well, we decided to camp together just outside of town for one more night hoping weekday traffic would be better.
We spent a lovely night together drinking shoplifted wine around the campire, sharing stories of the road and school and dreams of what post uni life will be like. Good times.