Since 2020, apparently, July has been celebrated as National Hitchhiking Month, at least according to National Today. What's strange, however, is that when I Google "national hitchhiking month", I get a hit on the Chicago Tribune site that shows a date of July 5, 1995, five years earlier. Unfortunately, I don't have a subscription to the Trib, so I can't see the page and figure out if Google is steering me wrong.
I searched for the origin of the word "hitchhiking", and the earliest that the Oxford English Dictionary (which I love!) records it is 1921, which is very recent. I had been wondering if the concept went back to the days of horses and wagons, but apparently it does not. It seems firmly connected with cars.
Anyway, National Today suggests that people should celebrate National Hitchhiking Month by hitchhiking or by giving a hitchhiker a ride, but I don't feel that adventurous in my old age. Instead, I'll mark the occasion by writing about the only time in my life that I hitchhiked, which was in France, of all places.
During the summer of 1982, I visited France on a student exchange program. The woman I was working for at USC, Connie Horak, was the coordinator of the program, which was part of a sister-city alliance between Los Angeles and Bordeaux. High school students alternated yearly between Americans going to Bordeaux and French coming to Los Angeles. I spent a good amount of my regular at-work time that spring typing lots of paperwork for the program, including lists of students who had applied for the first time or who were participating for their second summer.
At one point, Connie learned that a female American student who had hosted a French student the previous summer had decided not to go to France. She asked if I wanted to go to France in the place of the American student, so that the French student would have someone to participate with. I jumped at the chance. Not only did I figure this was a great (and relatively inexpensive) way to visit France, but I was actually a French major, so it was also a way to practice and improve my speaking skills.
I know we flew to Orly from Los Angeles. I think we traveled by train from Paris to Bordeaux, where we met our students. Sylvie, the student with whom I was paired, had decided that the perfect way to spend the summer was at a campground in Biarritz (more details of which is a story for another day). While we were there, I don't remember why, but at some point we wanted to go somewhere else. We didn't have a car, so we hitchhiked.
I was very nervous, because the reputation of hitchhiking in the United States by that time was that it could be very dangerous. I remember the man who picked us up was driving a Citroën. I think it was a 2CV. No memory of the color at this point!
And somehow, we survived. Nothing untoward happened to us; we arrived wherever we were trying to get to, and the driver let us leave the car with no problem.
I only recall the one hitchhiking trip, so we obviously found a different way to get back. And I've never even attempted to hitchhike since then.
How about you? Any good hitchhiking stories?
