Hitchhiking

When I was hitchhiking, I lost my shoes in Nebraska. Well, I didn’t actually lose them, someone stole them from me at a rest stop while I slept. Who steals a sleeping traveler’s shoes? Another story for another time, but when I awoke and realized that my shoes were gone with miles of broken road to go, my journey took…

Women hitchers have been around since the early days of hitchhiking. One of the first recorded instances of hitchhiking occurred in the late 19th century when a woman named Annie Edson Taylor hitched a ride from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, New York after having gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Probably the most famous woman hitcher was Clara Johnson, who…

The year was 1967, the summer that I fell in love with the open road. Young, naive, and adventurous, Route 66 whispered intoxicating thoughts of freedom in my ear, “you are young, this is your time to take flight.” Feeling like a butterfly poised on the edge of life’s flower, no stuffy dorm room or boring school room for me, I shunned the drudgery of…

50 Miles from Home I am now 50 miles from where my journey began. Oddly enough, I find myself standing at the entrance of the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. Why is this odd? Because I am writing a book about the grave of an unknown Civil War soldier and why he haunts it. …

While in Portland, Maine, in the summer of 2022, I read the book titled, Around the World on 50 Bucks: How I Left with Nothing and Returned a Rich Man, by Christopher Schacht. Schacht’s writing style reminds me of my own writing style, which is not the best. I know…

We left the thrift store wearing every single thing we’d bought. They may have been new-old clothes, but it was beyond description how heavenly it was to be warm again. Now we were seriously hungry. Good fortune was ours — there was a diner close by, so we trudged over…