Now in Tulare, update of the past few days

Our time in San Diego flew by fast with many brief visits with various family. My cousin Matthew was there the day we arrived but left the next day, so we squeezed in game playing and picture watching with him. Aunt Karen came by twice to say hi, Benjamin and Aunt Martha came by once and Caleb did too but we weren’t home when he did. I missed out on seeing my Uncles Bobbi and Rudy, and my cousins Caleb and Joshua. But Grandma Katy took us to see my Great-Uncle-Albert and my Great-Aunt-Stina, and we happened to see my first cousin once-removed when she was visiting Stina. We spent time with Uncle Karl and Grandma Katy at home, and when she took us out to dinner.

Grandma Katy's cat, Sadie

We got lost in Balboa Park one day but found our way back to South Park from downtown another day. Balboa Park is huge and beautiful. We saw many different types of gardens and hummingbirds followed us everywhere.

A hummingbird

Hitching away from San Diego proved fairly easy. Uncle Karl dropped us off by an I-5 north entrance that was also the entrance to a less major highway heading north. Two people stopped within the first 15 minutes, but neither was getting on I-5, so we passed up those rides. Then a couple our age stopped and they were getting on I-5 so we hopped in.

This was one of our most informative rides, at least about one particular topic: traveling kids and their societal counterparts. One of our drivers had traveled extensively by many means. She had hitchhiked, train-hopped, driven around in a van and crossed the country several times over before she turned 16. She didn’t consider us true travelers because we have money to support ourselves. Therefore, we will never really be “traveling kids.” Traveling kids are young people who just have an itch to travel and when they hear a train whistle blowing, they want to hop on that train. They don’t think about how they’re going to get by, they just go. What I am writing is not necessarily my opinion, but what I understood from what she was telling us.

Regarding how she decides whether or not to pick up hitchhikers, she said she is much more likely to pick up two people traveling together. Amongst traveling kids, the term for your travel companion is “road dog.” She is also more likely to pick people up if they look basically put-together. That is, if they have bags, and their stuff seems compact and packed away and isn’t too raggy looking. But mostly she goes by intuition when deciding whether or not to pick someone up.

She warned us a lot to think of all the potential bad situations we could get into while hitchhiking, so that we would have a plan in place in case something happened. She gave us several possible scenarios of things that could go wrong pretty quickly and easily. She didn’t tell us any horror stories, but from her indications I gathered she had many. She told us we looked pretty fresh, or something like that. She said her nickname on the road is Mama, because that is the role she tends to take.

I take her advice to heart. I want to be prepared for the worst, just in case. Having a plan in place for how Brendan and I will get in touch with each other or find each other in case we get separated is a good idea, and it isn’t something we’ve talked much about. But I also think that because of the way we look, we get treated differently than traveling kids. Several people who have picked us up told us that the only reason they did is because we looked normal, or because we looked like them (read, clean and white). The peace corps volunteers even thought we looked like European travelers and that helped determine their decision to stop. I’m just guessing on this, but I think our encounters with police have been more positve than most traveling kids’ encounters with police for this same reason. Our driver said a lot of young people who are traveling are wanted in some way back in their home states. That would automatically make them incredibly wary of police. But when police stop to ask Brendan and me questions about why we’re hitchhiking, we come across as innocent because we don’t have anything on our records, so they just tell us to move or to be more surreptitious, or they drive us to another spot. We are travleing by hitchhiking because we want to legitimize hitchhiking for the masses. We are not doing it because it is our last resort or in order to gain any street cred.

The other member of the couple giving us the ride is a writer. Her girlfriend said she is a great person to talk to about publishing, and I’m hoping we can keep in contact with both of them in the future. They dropped us off at the exit before I-5 meets 405. We stood by the northbound entrance and made a sign that said “405” because people getting on could be doing one or the other. About 10 minutes later, a young man driving towards the southbound entrance across the street pulled over and yelled across four lanes of traffic, “Where are you going?” We said, “Huntington Beach,” and he motioned for us to come over. Turned out he was just off work and was almost home, but he saw us and wanted to help us out, so he drove us directly to the address we were trying to get to. It was so nice of him. We’ve encountered so many people who have gone out of their way to help us get where we’re going.

In Huntington Beach we stayed with my sister-in-law’s brother, Ben, and his wife Jill. We had contacted a couchsurfer in Huntington Beach before I was reminded that Ben and Jill lived there. The couchsurfer wasn’t able to host us, but thankfully Ben and Jill were willing to even with super short notice. We had a great time staying with them. They have three delightful pug dogs and we got to go on a trip to the beach with them all.

The beach

Kyoki (sp?) and Odin

Brendan and Emma

I hadn’t see Ben and Jill in a long time, and they made us feel right at home. They even offered to drive us to Tulare, and we happily took them up on it. It is about a three and half hour drive, and they took us on a detour through Hollywood.


So cool! The one sidewalk star we got a closeup on was “Spanky" McFarland. We thought that might be a porn star name, but it turns out he was one of the characters on “Our Gang.”

George "Spanky" McFarland

And now we are in Tulare! Staying here is like being royalty. We get all the free food and drink at La Piazza (fancy, delicious Italian food) we want and we get entertained by the ultimate jesters: a 6 year old niece and 8 year old nephew. What bliss.

Balloons

Yesterday we went to Balboa Park. While there, I phoned John Johnson (aka Looney Dooney the Clown). John's ex-wife knew my father 29 years ago, and arranged for John to sleep on my dad's couch for 6 weeks when he first moved to Seattle. When my mom heard we would be in San Diego, she found him online and told him to look out for us.
He met us at Balboa park, and brought along his toys. He taught us how to make balloon animals and hats (and gave us some balloons), and he demonstrated his airbrush face-painting invention. Awesome! He really knows what he's doing, and he knows how to teach. In the few short hours we spent with him, we gained more potential busking skills than in the weeks we spent throwing balls at each other (though that was valuable and fulfilling, too). We managed to partially blow up a few balloons, and that was like realizing I could make people laugh for the first time. I couldn't stop grinning to do it again. That might be our future. At the very least, if we do YTN birthday parties again, we can offer balloons, too.

First self-created design: Squirrel with nut for Stina's mom.

Next, today we visited Stina's great-uncle Albert and great-aunt Stina (her namesake), then played in Balboa Park. We danced in the formal garden and crashed through the underbrush of a golf course. Altogether an active and delightful day. Tomorrow we're off to Huntington Beach for some beach sun and ocean, then hitching on up to Tulare. So far we've only had a couple rides in CA, and it's seemed a bit harder than other states... but first impressions are sometimes nothing. We'll see tomorrow.

It all works out for the best

Now, we're not believers in any particular greater power, but when you're hitchhiking you often start to see superstitions and patterns at work. I can only imagine that things happen as they were meant to be, and yes, we still think hitchhiking is incredible.

We spent Tuesday night in Yuma, Arizona, with Stina's first cousin once removed, Marcia, and her husband Dale and kids Brittany and Micah. We could have gotten a ride all the way to San Diego with a young couple on spring break from college, but we had these plans to stop in Yuma and figured we'd have no trouble getting from there to San Diego. So the couple dropped us off and we had a nice visit with family members Stina had never met before.

Stina's cousins' dog Malibu, a crazy licker.

Malibu on Brendan's arm

Dale, Stina and Marcia

The next day, Wednesday, we got ourselves dropped off at a Love's truck stop at 11:40 AM and walked about asking drivers if they could take us to San Diego. Most were either truly full with people and baggage or said they were going east. When we went through the convenience store, a friendly employee asked about our trip and wished me luck. We went out the back to where the truckers fueled up, asked one trucker, and while we were asking him, I heard the loudspeaker say "Soliciting rides from truckers is prohibited" or something like that. Stina didn't hear it, but I guided her away from that area and we went to the sidewalk with a sign.

A fellow who was late for work said he felt really bad about saying no to us earlier, and took us back to Yuma where we could wait at the Circle K gas station and the onramp from the city proper. We waited there for another hour or so until a young Marine took us 2 miles out of town. From this spot we watched white buses hauling port-a-potties carrying migrant workers back and forth and giant trucks filled with citrus trundle by. We turned down a ride from a man who said he was only going to the casinos and that our current spot was better than where he'd drop us off (why he stopped to tell us that, I don't know. Perhaps he thought we might just be hitching to the casino). We waited another hour. This was the view:

Finally, another older Marine (30-something) who'd served in operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom took us to that casino exit. He seemed to either have short term memory loss or PTSD or something because he told us 3 times each that he was an alcoholic gamblaholic, got $2500 a month for disability, and asked us twice if we had children.

We were a little relieved to get out since he also kept offering us Jaegermeister and asking us if we wanted to join him in the casino or if we had any cash. By this time, we'd gone 7 miles in 4 hours.

One car per minute passed us by, and we were on an intersection with a route to and from Mexico. This time I clasped my hands together and an RV stopped for us. Mark, his mom, Alice, and their neighbor, Dallas, saw us on their way back to Palm Springs from Mexico where they had dental work done. They'd be on the I-8 until El Centro. About 40 miles down the road, amongst the sand dunes, Mark, a hot springs enthusiast, spotted an oasis, complete with palm trees lining a pond and everything iconic you can imagine. We all stopped for a dip for about an hour. basking in the 106 degree hot springs and swimming in the cool pond. If not for our earlier terrible luck, we never would have gone.

They dropped us in El Centro. After being warned by a state trooper that the only ride we could expect at the onramp would be one to the county jail, we moved to the sidewalk 20 feet from where we'd been, safe on city property. After not nearly as long as our earlier waits had been, 2 public health students from Tucson on spring break (also former peace corps volunteers from Africa) stopped and asked us, "How do we know you're not murderers?" We answered as best we could, and rode with their enthusiasm all the way to San Diego. They knew about Couchsurfing and seemed interested and supportive of our idea of legitimizing hitchhiking. They seemed to enjoy the story we told them (about reaching the top of a mountain on the back of an ant), and were so excited to have hosted their first hitchhikers that they took our pictures and promised to befriend us on Facebook.

View from I-8 on the way to San Diego.