After an unexpected few days in Jail, I was back in the wild of California, free bird instead of jailbird. My brother had come to scoop me up after I'd been released and I was staying with him at his girlfriends place to gather myself, tie up some loose ends and brew some beer of course.
First loose end, I had no idea where my backpack was. "Backpack" could also be read: everything I own. To sum up the jail thing, some people had taken me in while hitchhiking for the night, I'd blacked out drunk, coming to in their car a few blocks from their house wondering why they'd given me the keys and where I was supposed to be going. Before I could find any answers, blue and red lights were flashing and I was being arrested. Apparently I'd been gone long enough for them to report the car stolen, they didn't really know me that well, after all, who knows what what was going though their heads.
The day started early and went along like many an ideal hitchhiking day has in the past, even into the night like a dream with travel magic at the forefront, but like a dream it came to an end. Also like a dream there's details I can't recall, fuzzy memories and an unexplained black patch of time that landed me in jail with hefty charges, I wasn't dreaming anymore.
Like I say, all started well, I was coming off spending a few days in a Phoenix suburb with two great friends catching up on a years worth of stories and talking about hiking and camping gear - they'd done 1,600 or more of hiking the past year and I'd recently been designing up a hybrid backpacking shelter gizmo of a project.
I'd hitchhiked to Phoenix from California, coming off a four month adventure with Bridget around the US and Mexico. She'd flown back to Australia the previous Sunday (April 1, 2012), I'd dropped her off at the airport, borrowing my sister's car, then spending the night with a couch surfer in Hollywood.
All together I spent four months traveling around with Bridget, a girl I'd met in Australia earlier that year. She flew into Los Angeles in late November 2011 where I picked her up. We had a big adventure, I finally finished writing all the stories and editing two videos together from the trip, one in the US, the other in Mexico.
Below you can see the videos and links to all the stories along the way. To summarize our trip, we starting by hitchhiking up to Northern California, then across the country to be in the Northeast (New York and Connecticut) in time for Christmas and New Years.
We managed to get several free bus tickets and link our way down the east coast via Washington DC, Knoxville, Atlanta and Orlando. We kept hitching from there, all the way down to Key West where we hung out by the docks in hopes of hitching a ride on a boat in a South American direction.
With time and money short (Bridget had an April 1st flight out of LA to catch), we decided instead to hitch by land when no boat popped up right away, although we were just minutes away from going towards Bermuda with one guy.
We made a "Peru" sign and headed up through Florida and west, stopping in New Orleans for a little while. By the time we left New Orleans we dropped our South American goal all together and instead got excited about Baja, Mexico.
We hitched west, passing through the Grand Canyon and other parts of Arizona, then dropped down into Mexico. We spent a month enjoying Baja before popping back into the states for one final week before Bridget caught her flight back home to Australia.
The first video is from our time linking up initially and hitching around the United States:
And the second one, mostly just clips of the Baja scenery:
There's also two photo albums from the trip: In the USA and in Baja.
Bridget, Barry and I rolled out of the Mexican beach paradise in an American direction. All together Bridget and I had spent about a month in Baja and four months with each other all together. In less than a weeks time she had a flight back to Australia leaving from Los Angeles.
We'd only met Barry several days before this through several degrees of people, quickly it went something like this: A guy picked us up hitchhiking day two in Mexico and let us crash with him in his village, he introduced us to a guy named Luciano who lived there as well. On our loop back up Mexico we went to visit Luciano, bumping into his neighbor Kevin along the way. We partied with Kevin for some days, then he pointed us to this village south of San Felipe where he knew a couple who could put us up. Barry was this couple's neighbor.
Bridget and I had spent close to a month in Baja, hitching all the way down to Cabo and had now began coming back north towards the US again. We'd stopped in a coastal village for several nights revisiting some people we'd met on the way down. A guy named Jesse had given us a ride south of Ensenada and introduced us to the village and friends, on this trip up we'd spent some time with a guy named Kevin that we hadn't met the first time around, now he was suggesting a place to stay close to San Felipe with a couple that bounced between there and this current village we stood in.
We caught a ride out of town and a good portion of the way from a friend of Kevin's, he was an interesting guy who told us about his younger days and travels. He dropped us off on the far side of Ensenada and stuck our thumbs out, getting a ride from the first pickup truck to come along.
