Short hitchhiking trip in California

“Hitchhiking in California????? Forget it!! Don’t even think about it!! Yes, there used to be a lot of hitchhikers.. but nowadays there are so many weirdos!” – I can’t remember how many people – Californians and others – gave me answers like this.. But as I was there without a car and as it is difficult or sometimes not even possible to use public transportation, hitchhiking seemed to be an option for me. Why should there be so many more “weirdos” on the streets of California than we have here in Europe?

But as it really seems to be a strange thing to do, my cousin decided to drive 5 hours up north just to pick us up before we could even stick a thumb out towards any street…

Anyway, one sunny monday we woke up and decided to go to Whiskeytown lake, that is located quite close to the city, it’s about a 15min ride. We walked over to the street that is leading out of town and to Whiskeytown lake, and stretched our thumbs out next to a gas station. Soon, a woman, probably working at the gas station, walked over to us and told us it was not a good idea to stand here. If we walked out of town we would have way better chances, she said. Well yes, she was right, but walking out of town would take us about one hour! So this lady asked every single car driver that was at the gas station. And she waved us over and told us to sit in this car; they would bring us to the end of the city. Great! We jumped on the back seat and a small dog jumped on us, trying to lick our faces like crazy. We couldn’t really get rid of it. But we found out that our driver didn’t have to go in this direction at all!! He only did it for us! How sweet! Now, at the city border, cars drove fast fast fast… But already after some seconds one car pulled over. Again, as we had climbed in, there was a small crazy dog trying to lick our faces. The driver didn’t really have to go to the lake, but of course he drove us up there, and he even went further to bring us to a nice empty beach!!

After being at the beach in our tanktops on the 4th of January (hehe) we decided to try to hitchhike back. There weren’t many cars.. actually I thought there was maybe one car every 15minutes or so.. As soon as we decided that we want to go back, two women showed up at the beach. We started chatting a little bit, some smalltalk, and guess what: They were just about to go back to Redding, and of course they would take us with them!

Easy as it can be!

Maybe next time I’ll have the chance to try to get to San Fran by hitchhiking!