A few days ago, I found myself driving across a familiar section of Dartmoor. Considering the time was around 3am, you can imagine my surprise when, after turning a fairly tight corner, I was greeted by two individual sets of rapidly waving thumbs. Snapping out of the driving trance I had slipped into, I decided to pull over and find out if the thumb’s had anything attached to them.
After leaning across and winding down the window I called into the darkness “Alright Lads?”
Once a few seconds had passed, a response came, “Hiya, can we jump in?”
Feeling a little dubious, but trying to maintain a sense of stoicism I let them in. In the light of the car, I quickly realised it was a good decision. Apparently, after a rather heavy night out in Plymouth, they had only managed to save enough money for half the taxi ride home. Once the taxi had made it to the halfway point, they had been forced to try and walk the rest of the journey. To my astonishment, they had already walked 6 miles and I was the first driver to pull over. In his words, “We’ve had about seven cars drive past, and four lorries. They were all way bigger than your car but they just completely ignored us.” After wondering whether I should feel offended for his brief mention of my ‘small car’, we had a brief conversation about hitch-hiking, and why it just doesn’t seem to sit well with the UK road network.
During my time in Canada last year, Hitch-hiking was a great way to travel. Moreover, it seemed that anyone with a spare seat, regardless of their age or gender, would happily open their door to a complete stranger. In one particularly memorable act of generosity, I remember a small Asian lady who picked up me and my mate Tony. Not only did she take us back to town with no request for petrol money, but she also loaded both our boards on top of her Van and opened the doors for us. Arriving in town, she then ran around the van before we had even undone our seatbelts, and basically chauffeured us into our house. An incredibly kind act that left us both feeling a little confused, but happy.
A shame then, that hitch-hiking in England seems to be a dying method of transport. Maybe it’s just a result of British culture falling into a state of fear. With the media constantly telling us all to lock our doors, and then providing constant updates of just how dangerous anything out of the ordinary can be, it seems we are all destined to walk to our destination. Even if a big car does happen to drive past.
