“This is a good spot,” I said to Lauren. The long, straight road that stretched out before us was lined by trees but still had plenty of space either side for vehicles to pull over and stop. A steady succession of vehicles crawled along the road through the still air. Bumper to bumper festival-goers all on their way home.
While hitchhiking from St. Petersburg to Moscow, one of our drivers left us in this tiny Russian village along the highway: five small huts with bored women, each supported by a hot, cooking samovar on front.
The hills are filled with rust and gold.
It’s funny how one has a tendency to become the other, in a roundabout way.
Not only were my hosts on their way to join the New Zion Army, they were also stopping in Charlie’s hometown, Minneapolis, so they could live with his mom, get jobs, and save some money.
A man going to work took me to Cedar City, a town in southern Utah. I could see I was going to spend a lot of time trying to hitch out of there. A car would go by no more than once every five minutes traveling north on the near empty interstate which lead to Salt Lake City.
The pickup truck, that had whisked me across the California desert, dropped me off on the strip in Las Vegas. In those days the casinos were smaller, many open to the street.
I sat in the back of the speeding pickup surveying the desert in the direction the other hitchhiker was pointing. “There’s water in those mountains,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t anything green as far as I could see. The truck was approaching a gas station where the guy wanted to be left off.
“You see this green part on the map? That means there’s water out there.”
A ridiculously inexpensive flight from Milan to Tokyo and back, my backpack, a fluent-Japanese-speaking girlfriend wwoofing on a tropical island in southern Japan who is waiting for you (while Europe is buried in snow), and a copy of Will Ferguson's book "Hitching Rides with Buddha" [1].
Still filled with happiness in our hearts from the last ride, we walk up to the Ukrainian border guard. Hmmm, we could have known better. We give him our passports and as he flicks through them he says: "Where is your arrival stamp for the Ukraine?"
"We didn't get one", I answered.
"Impossible", was his simple reply.
I was on a mission - I wanted to see the midnight sun as far North as I could make it during its solstice, when the position of the sun reaches its northernmost extreme in the sky
