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Hitch Hiking

rebelccfc

Would/Have you ever hitch hiked somewhere?

Ever come across any freaks if you have hitch hiked?

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RedXIV

Once hitchhiked from Carlow to Dubin in the early hours of the morning and got picked up by a Tesco truck driver. one of the nicest guys I've ever met. Was expecting a fourth kid when I was walking to him.

No idea who you are mr. truck driver but hope all is well!

thebigbiffo

i hitchhiked all around the locality when i was a kid and graduated up to it being my prefered mode of transport in my late teens and early twenties. i once held a sign up for dublin outside limerick - the side of the road going into limerick. i wondered for 20mins what everyone was laughing at before i copped it - was some party the night before though

i swore some days in the pisses of rain and freezing cold i'd never pass a hitchhiker when i got my own car - although i pick up the odd one, it's still just the people i like the look of...

r3nu4l

Why I don't pick up hitch-hikers

galah

hitchhiked around Ireland three summers in a row, back in the 90ies. Great craic. The 'weirdest' people:

a guy with a huge axe in the boot (who turned out to be a forrester, but man we were scared first),

a crazy truck driver with the thickest accent, who wanted to marry one of us (either one, he wasnt fussy apparently) - we couldnt understand him though, only realised later that that's what he was on about;

one really nice older gent who took a huge detour from his route to show us some castles around Mayo (I think),

one guy who got really upset cause we couldn't pronounce 'Youghal' correctly (Yoch-awl - apparently, not 'You-gall'),

two lads from the North who brought uss from Cork all the way to Portadown to show us their 'swimming pool' (a tupperware box out the back, good fun nonetheless),

a really nice poet from near Drogheda with whom we stayed for a couple of days in his cottage in the woods,

some guy from near Aughrim who wanted us to stay with him and his mom...

the list is endless. Those were the days (and I am actually amazed that nothing nasty ever happened...)

JONJO THE MISER

Often hitch hiked when i was younger, haven't done it in years.

PeterIanStaker

Nope, never hitch hiked, I like my skin where it is, on my body, and not on a lampshade.

koppy

hitched 20 mile to college every day in late 90's..dont see too many doing it now..

CreepingDeath

On a weekend away in my college days, 5 of us split up and hitchhiked from Galway to Cleggan. Took about 3 or 4 hours if I recall.

BrokenArrows

nah i have never done it. mainly because i have a car. but if i was stuck i would give it a go.

Cumann de Barra

Ya couldn't pay me enough money to pick up a hitchhiker. Always smelly looking people.

admiralofthefleet

i bring a bag of lime with me just in case

chakotha

I used to hitch when I was in secondary school and college circa 1990. A fun way to travel and usually faster than the bus.

I was out of the country until 1998 and when I returned nobody seemed to be doing it anymore. I spent 2 hours waiting in vain for a 5 mile spin. Times had changed so much plus I (in my mid-late 20's) was no longer in the demographic. Lesson learned!

It's shame that the 20 year olds can't easily hitch around nowadays.

Celtic tiger materialism has something to answer for. And there seems to be more general fear than before.

fakearms123

Hitchhiking is for murderers and hippies, everyone knows that

Kimono-Girl

one of my friends hitch hiked his way to Kerry, it was too late for the bus and a cab would cot a fortune, and he didn't want to bother us to drive him...luckily he made it down there with a really nice family...

i would never pick one up though :eek:

Rowley Birkin QC

chakotha wrote: »

I used to hitch when I was in secondary school and college circa 1990. A fun way to travel and usually faster than the bus.

I was out of the country until 1998 and when I returned nobody seemed to be doing it anymore. I spent 2 hours waiting in vain for a 5 mile spin. Times had changed so much plus I (in my mid-late 20's) was no longer in the demographic. Lesson learned!

It's shame that the 20 year olds can't easily hitch around nowadays.

Celtic tiger materialism has something to answer for. And there seems to be more general fear than before.

Now that's just lazy.

arybvtcw0eolkf

I hitch hiked around Israel, great craic and met some super people - including getting a lift from two Israeli soldiers, when we got chatting they were able to give me the map reference's of the various UN positions where I was based in Lebanon.. They were tanker's and stationed in a compound above Haddatha village and were routinely firing on us - I stayed with the lads in their appartment for a weekend in Akko.

Met a girl from Uraguay in Eilat, and hitch hiked to some Kibbutz in northern Israel.. This was before the internet, facebook or mobile phones so when we went our way, that was it - she was bloody beautiful!.

pickarooney

Hitchhiked from the south of Holland to the south of France and from the south of Holland to Brittany and then one time I was in the south of Holland and I went to get some beer and ended up hitchhiking to the north of Germany. Met mostly sound people and a couple of half-cracked Kazakh truck-drivers.

I really didn't like the south of Holland much.

My brother hitchhiked from Oregon to Alaska once.

ldxo15wus6fpgm

pickarooney wrote: »

I really didn't like the south of Holland much.

Why did you keep going back then?

Japandamo

Hitched from Kefalonia, in Greece, to Kerry last summer. Took eleven days and eighty-two lifts. Amazingly not one bad experience, although I think by the law of averages I should have met at least one weirdo.

Here, I found that it was surprisingly easy to get lifts once I managed to get out of Dublin. Interestingly several of the people that picked me up were 40+ and said that they'd stopped for me because they used to hitch around a lot back in the day.

Managed to do it without hacking up any drivers, too.

brandon_flowers

I was thumbing home one day from Abbeyfeale to Listowel after getting a lift as far as Abbeyfeale from Cork. I went to the bus stop and would have to wait for 2 hours for the next bus. I waited for a few minutes and then I decided to thumb instead.

Anyway I got picked up by three travellers in a Transit, couldn't have been nicer even though I was fired into the back with all sorts of power tools, bits of guttering, a fireplace and other random items.

Funny thing is for the 10 minutes I was at the bus stop some skank offered me a swig of her Linden Village and a sniff of some glue she had in her pocket... this was the instant I decided I was thumbing. To get away from the nutter I said "I'm getting a drive, I must go" she said " Don't take a lift from strangers"

Well I'm ****ing glad I did.

Edit: And I've often picked a few up too, usually the kind looking for a drive home rather than the touristy type.

AgileMyth

Japandamo wrote: »

Hitched from Kefalonia, in Greece, to Kerry last summer. Took eleven days and eighty-two lifts. Amazingly not one bad experience, although I think by the law of averages I should have met at least one weirdo.

Sorry to tell you but that means you are the weirdo.

bodhrandude

Got stranded in Knock with a mate on our way up to Sligo from Galway in the early 1990s, we were stuck in Knock for 4 hours. My mate took to writing on a sign Do to others as you would have them do to you. All we could see was nuns and priests in cars looking at us scruffy hippies (at the time anyway) and accelerating faster by us lol.

jaffacakesyum

Are any of you women or know women who have hitch hiked? I would love to do it someday....something to tick off the aul list! But as a female I would be a bit scared of doing it on my own.

Duggy747

r3nu4l wrote: »

Why I don't pick up hitch-hikers

Why I don't pick up hitch-hikers! :pac:

LiamMc

Hitching used to part of my commute to work when I was living outside of Dublin centre and had to work on Sunday mornings with no car. Public services is still poor enough to city centre, I have sympathy for anyone having to hitch-hike as a commute and be stigmatised with a Mental Illness.

Hitched on different holidays in different parts of the World. The Developing World doesn't have the same stigma/stranger-danger immaturity that the Developed World has regarding the shared experience of travelling in the same direction.
Sharing rides, including monetary payment, is quite normal and appreciated by both parties in the Developing World.

Shared taxis redundant in Dublin
There doesn't seem to be the shared taxis leaving from Dame Street/College Green Dublin 2 that there was a few years ago.
There doesn't seem to be one reason but I have heard Gender, Privacy and Prestige as reasons given for it's demise.

dj jarvis

i would recommend hitch hiking to anyone

i hitched from dublin port to the polish / Belarus border in the mid 90's

i went via england , france belguim holland gemany and poland
had great craic , went to a few festivals along the way,
ended up staying with random old women at the border with Belarus , they put me up , no english spoken and some pigeon German , but by feck did we drink
and these pair of little old polish women drank me under the table , literally , becasue i woke up on the floor under the kitchen table , happy days

do it while ya can - pity , eastern europe was just openening up and the people were REAL friendly , not sure how it is now

but go , go now

phasers

I hitchhiked once, the guy who picked me up was really nice. After I helped him bury that rug he had in the boot of his car he brought me straight home!

seenitall

jaffacakesyum wrote: »

Are any of you women or know women who have hitch hiked? I would love to do it someday....something to tick off the aul list! But as a female I would be a bit scared of doing it on my own.

I'm a woman and a I hitch-hiked a fair bit in Ireland around 2000-2003, mainly the Sligo-Mayo-Galway route at that time. Had good craic with folks, the Irish are sound on that score, all ages stopped, more men then women but maybe because men drive long distance more too. Some guys will try and chat you up, but it's all in the spirit of fun, really.

In all that time, there were only a couple of iffy situations, where the conversation started to go in a weird direction, but what I did was I got busy with my phone, ringing a friend or whatever, telling them where I was and what I was doing, so that's how I would deal with it. I do remember being scared at the time though, especially with one of them. On one hand, two iffy situations out of hundreds of lifts isn't too bad, but on the other hand, it takes only one of those situations to quickly escalate for a lone woman and then you're in trouble.

So take from that what you will, jaffa.

I know that I will never ever condone my daughter hitch-hiking, I'm far too protective of her.

Ireland is, coincidentally, the best place to hitch-hike in my experience. Some of the Eastern Europe is pretty bad, some of France is good but not as good as Ireland, but the South of France, for example, is atrocious. NO ONE stopped for me at the French Riviera (I guess I should have figured it out beforehand, you don't get rich by being kind and stopping for people... time is money!

)

3qsmavrod5twfe

Spent a summer on the buildings in the early 00's and hitched every day. A lot of the people who pick you up are generally a bit wacky themselves. Over the course of the 10 or 12 weeks I was doing it I got lifts from the travellers, a postman (who warned me to put on the seat belt for fear I'd make a mess of his windscreen!), a guy driving a car transporter (having that pull up outside the house was some craic) and some guy in a brand new E-Class Merc who was claiming to be some sort of music promoter.

The only time I got a really weird vibe was this one guy, who, for want of a better expression, seemed a little bit touched. He picked me up, picked up another guy, drove about 10 miles out of his way to drop the other guy off, then a further 5 or 6 and the dropped me off (well away from where I actually lived I might add), all the while talking about living with mammy (he was well into his 40's). That was one of the longest 30mins I've ever spent in the front seat of a car. Maybe he was just starved for a bit of company but fcuk me it was weird!

B.A._Baracus

I could be wrong on this but when I was growing up hitch-hiking seemed a lot more common. You'd hear people mention it more. Nowadays when its mentioned its usually followed with "the fuck i would!" :P

Personally, i'd never hitch-hike nor would I ever pick up a hitch-hiker. You just don't know these days.