When I was a teenager, a friend of mine named Matt would tell me stories about how he hitchhiked to California, Oregon and Florida. I loved those stories and I wanted some adventure like Matt. Some of Matt's advice was, "always keep moving, like you have somewhere to go, nobody picks up a hitchhiker who is sitting down." I didn't have the nerve to do any long distance thumbing until I was eighteen and hitchhiked to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. A year later I hitchhiked from California to Kansas City. Once I could afford a car, I gave up hitchhiking. Here is a photo of me at the peak of my hitchhiking expertise. I refined the art of thumbing a ride to include using a CB radio. It all happened by accident, I used a CB radio on a trip from Kansas City to San Diego to deliver a car. The cost of flying back was excessively high and the bus took 4 days! Having hitchhiked long distances before I had little fear of covering the 1600 miles back to KC. I already had a backpack and after giving it a think as to what to do with this CB, I stopped into a hardware store and purchased two 6-volt lantern batteries. I wired the batteries in series making a 12volt supply, hooked it to the CB and attached the clip-on aerial to my pack frame. I switched the radio to channel 19 and straight away, I got chatter. I was dropped off about 30 miles east of San Diego and that is where this photo was taken. After spending the night on an entrance ramp in the mountains behind me, I got a ride at sunrise the next morning. The driver let me off about 100 miles out in the stinking desert. There I radioed a westbound trucker who arranged an eastbound ride with "the Copenhagen". The Copenhagen was a 6'-6 tall tobacco chewing Texan named Scott who was a law student at Baylor. I rode in his Toyota Celica from the stinking desert to Waco Texas in about 28 hours.
From Waco I got rides north up I-35 to the Oklahoma turnpike and across to US 79 all the way to KC. The whole trip took just 2-1/2 days and could have cost me my life. When you are 18 or 19 years old, you are brave, crazy or stupid enough to do anything. Hitchhiking is a dangerous business, you never know whose car you're getting into. With a CB there are a few more witnesses however.