The open road is a hitchhiker's best friend. A two-lane highway in a remote place is the best kind of road. You're going north or you're going south, that's all there is to it. Stop in at a town for a bite to eat, then stick out your thumb and get back on the road. Urban sprawl, on the other hand, is a trap for us, a slog through a hostile jungle. In cities the going is slow. Everyone going every which-way, thru-traffic is hard to find, and the good hitching spots are few. On the country road, just walk to the edge of town and now everyone is going your direction and happy to give you a ride.

As an infrequent hitchhiker, this trip started with that slightly sick, anxious feeling in the bottom of my stomach one feels when one gets close to the moment of truth in some questionable enterprise. I took the city bus to the outskirts of Santa Cruz. When the bus route crossed the highway, I knew it was time, time to put plans into action. The queasy feeling comes from knowning that a road that looks simple on a map is really a complex thing, with onramps and offramps and bubbles of urban sprawl. What if no one stops? What if I don't get to a good stopping place by sundown? What if the road turns into an unwelcoming high-speed, six-lane freeway? I pulled the cord and stepped out into an unknown place, on my own now. With that slightly queasy feeling I marched over the road and down onto the onramp, right by that pedestrians prohibited sign, set my bag down, put on a grin and stuck out my thumb.

And that queasy feeling instantly disappears when the feeling of the open road comes flooding in, when the third car to pass stops and offers a ride. Now you know it's all going to work out, that hitchhiking still works, the river is still flowing, the train is still moving, America is still yours to discover, and you can travel it with just a small knapsack and no fixed itinerary. You've injected yourself into the bloodstream of society, you're coursing along, mixing and mingling with the machinery of society. Along one of the most beautiful roads in California, too: Steinbeck Country, Monterey, Big Sur, Morro Bay.

Ten rides, Santa Cruz to San Luis Obispo

0. 09:19 am, Santa Cruz city bus #71, Santa Cruz towards Watsonville, $1.50. All of the crazy people I met on my trip were aboard this bus.

1. "Sorry I'm only going a couple miles, but you're welcome to a ride!"
   "A mile's a mile, thanks for picking me up!"
   After I got him started story-telling, he seemed genuinely disappointed he wasn't going further.
   "Too bad our ride's so short, there's so many stories we could share!"
   To Larkin Valley exit.

2. Waiting at an onramp, the first vehicle to pass picked me up, a small farm delivery truck taking oranges to market. Got to try out my tiny bit of spanish. Agricultural workers are a reliable source of rides, and riding in trucks is fun. Waiting at onramps, especially in the country, is very effective.

3. A pretty 35 year-old woman with an infant in the back seat picked me up from an on-ramp at the edge of Monterery and took me to the other side of town in a fancy new Honda.

Waiting for rides is really a visceral experience of a Poisson process; doesn't matter how long you've been waiting, the next ride could be yours. Standing along side the highway, the wait can seem an eternity. But then you check the time and see that it's only been ten minutes.

4. "Hey, I figured you look like a clean-cut kid, I figured, Hey why not?"
   Middle-aged Hispanic woman on her way home from work in Santa Cruz.

5. In a raised, black F350 truck with a painting-company logo on the side: "Hey, what's in the bag? No guns or nothing? 'cause I got a gun and I'll shoot you. [pause, grin] Well, you look pretty clean-cut. We're going to Carmell." The same driver handed me a bottle of wine when he dropped me off at the general store in Big Sur.

Here, amongst redwoods and mountain streams, I wished I were traveling with a backpack, a sleeping bag, and a tent. Hike, camp, hitch a ride, repeat.

6. My favorite ride of the trip, a short one from the general store to a scenic veiw stop a couple miles down the road, with Hal in his 1968 Toyota landcruiser.

The ocean view is beautiful, but I'm nervously measuring the diminishing distance between the sun and the sea.

7. Dan picked me up from the turnout where I was stationed, overlooking the ocean but generally being ignored by the tourists driving the highway. "You know, I had a feeling there'd be a hitchhiker," he said.

   Feathers, fossils, and dried flowers lined the dashboard of his Honda CRV. At first I feared he might be of the annoying overly-spiritual sort, but our conversation turned out to be quite enjoyable. He's a conservationist for the American Land Trust, out on a field trip to investigate a few sites. We discussed astronomy and geology and out of the corner of his eye he somehow spotted a huge bobcat stalking its prey in a field along side the road. Dropped me off at the Hearst Castle road in San Simeon.

I'm passing and being passed by many long-distance bikers, making their way up and down the Pacific Coast Bike Route.

8. A nice guy in a pickup took me twenty miles down the road on his way home from work. It occurs to me that no-one has asked me why I am hitching, as if it's assumed to be a completely normal activity.

9. Immediately I was picked up by an enthusiastic Peruvian and his young wife and stuffed myself into the back of their tiny Honda alongside their cute infant daughter named Adrianna. Dropped me off on Santa Rosa street in San Luis Obispo. Dinner, a hostel, a train station.

180 miles in about 7.5 hours, an average speed of 24 miles/hour. Probably with a sign I could have held out for a long distance ride and made the trip at full highway speed, but meeting so many people and traveling leisurely along the coast highway was kind of the point. Eating waffles at a cafe in San Luis Obispo, the slow travel, stopping at dusk to check into a hostel, seemed delightfully and refreshingly antiquarian in an age of red-eye flights, late-night arrivals, and rushed connections.

Beats taking the all-night greyhound, anyway.