On The Road Again 2019 - Epilogue

Before I left on my journey I had had this vision of the perfect trip. I would get great rides with only short waits in between. The weather would be nice (no rain but not too hot with just enough wind to keep the bugs away). If I slept outside it would be a glorious evening with the sky full of stars, soft grass to sleep on and no bugs. It was going to be my final hitchhiking trip - one more time across at least half of the country -celebrating my 70th birthday. My sense of the romance of hitchhiking was going to be fulfilled in every way imaginable.

It was instead not the best of trips. The weather for at least 24 hours was terrible; the rides, while they were great when they came were bracketed by long waits in between. My sore foot made walking and even standing uncomfortable and occasionally downright painful. And the trip took at least a day longer than I thought it should.

Perhaps even worse, some of the rules I had created for myself, rules that in the past seemed to garner me good rides - were demonstrated to be rather irrelevant. The person with the skateboard that I met at the Flying J just outside of Winnipeg, the one who was fairly aggressive seeking rides with the truck drivers and who was annoyingly hyper - got to Vancouver Island the same time as I did. The nice young man with the large dog ( a husky/shepherd mix) got just as many rides as I did, hitchhikers who asked if we could stop and then begged for smokes so they could smoke when we stopped - went as far as I did. I didn't hear any of my travelling companions tell stories nor or do anything else to get that few extra miles - but they got them anyway.

At least on this trip, it didn't matter where I stood, what I wore or whether I had a sign saying where I was going (no one else did). It was, quite frankly a little bit depressing. I felt silly that I had tried so hard to be a "good hitchhiker". When I got home - just over a month ago - I was clear. That had been my last trip. I was done with hitchhiking. My body was no longer in good enough shape to make it fun, I was just too damn old to be out on the highway with my thumb stuck out. I did not need to prove anything to anyone. I had hitchhiked across the country numerous times, made a few epic trips like the summer I crossed the country twice or the time that I went from Sudbury to Yellowknife to Duncan and then back to Sudbury. I was done. But......

I am quite sure that when springtime comes around again I will think about all of the drivers that I have never meet, of the endless possibilities that are out there if one only trusts the gods of hitchhiking. I suspect that I will miss my dreams of being on the open road and I may, just one more time, be seduced by those dreams.

Who says I am too old?