05/05/2004: "Great Hitch-Hikes - the York Jazz Festival."

Hitch-hiking. Well, I have memories of several super-hitching stories. The first one that I can think of was myself and Gary Adshead, circa 1985. It all started...

(click below to see the whole story)

We were at a party somewhere down in Cottesloe , down on good-ole Broome Street (More about the "Broome Street run" later). I can't for the life of me remember what the party was for, but it was a Friday night, I remember that much. The party was in a Sports Hall, with a big oval next door, and a large wall going up to the street. The wall was almost vertical, and Geoff and I spent ages trying to climb up. I cheated, and Adam Floyd helped me up the last bit, but Geoff kept on trying, and finally succeeded about 1/2 an hour later. I don't think the party was very much fun, and we wanted to go up to the York Jazz Festival. So, it seeming like a good idea at the time (and most ideas seem like good ideas while drunk at 2:00 in the morning), Gary and I decided to hitch to York. We set off, paused at Stanley Street to pick up a backpack full of beer [1], and set off.

Memories of the hitch itself are fading now, but a few highlights still stand out. We wound up on Riverside Drive, down below the Bridge. There was a little old Italian man in a Purple valiant, stopped at the traffic lights. We went up to the window, and made pretty obvious hitching signs. He told us to 'F#%^ Off', and sped away from the lights. I took this as an insult, so hurled my mostly-empty beer can after him. I must have had a tail wind and a lucky trajectory, because the can bounced squarely off the centre of his roof, with a lovely 'bong' noise - this was in the days of the good old steel cans - A man new where he was with a steel can, unless, of course, he was lost.

At the sound of this noise, Gary and I made a quick, strategic change in planned routes, and ran away up a side street. By some lucky chance, this side street just happened to lead us up to that haven of midnight travelers, Fast Eddies. For those of you who don't know Fast Eddies, it is an all-night burger bar, which seems to be the meeting place of all the people you were never expecting to see, unless you tried the old and tired bluff of going there expecting to see someone you weren't expecting to see, in which case you wouldn't. Eddy has not been spotted for several years now, and rumours have it that his size has reached such a proportion that he cannot leave his room.

As we were expecting to see someone unexpected, we saw no-one. We ate a couple of burgers, and then called on the helpful advice of the entire clientèle, as to which direction we should take to hitch to York. After taking a quick statistical summary of this advice, which would have left us sitting in Fast Eddies, we ignored them all and headed off again into the unknown.

Next stop was the Entertainment Centre. This is the big Concert hall in the middle of Perth, which is usually quite empty at this time of the morning. I guess that it must have been about 3:00 by now. Well, we were quickly drawn by a large-ish crowd outside. We went and shared a few beers with them, mostly bogun [2] types. It took a while to find out what they were waiting for, as they didn't seem to be making any sort of queue. Apparently, tickets for some Concert or other were going on sale on Tuesday, so they had decided to 'hang out' for a while. We again took a quick poll on suggested directions for hitching, completely ignored the advice, and headed off.

We then got a lift from two girls, somewhere near the Causeway. I don't exactly remember the story in this car, but one of the two (the driver I guess) was nice and friendly, and so being good and quiet Hitch-hikers that we were, we immediately tried to convince here to take us back to her place. She was actually wavering towards a yes on this one, but her friend (Why do the nice girls always have them?) was the 'blocker' (see blocker footnote), and so wanted nothing to do with men in general, and less to do with us in particular. So, we waved our sad goodbyes somewhere the Perth side of Midland.

Here the Hitch hiking slowed down a little, and we walked for about half an hour without a lift. Gary's nervous energy was running down about this time, and he said he wanted to take a nap. I was still fine, and the beer-backpack almost seemed to be getting lighter - well, it was! As chance would have it, we were passing a shopping centre at the time. So, the connections were made for another 'Good Idea At The Time'. I grabbed a shopping trolley, Gary climbed in to sleep, and I carried on wheeling him in front of me. Gary dropped off quickly, and I soon decided that the footpath was too cracked and rough for him to sleep properly, so I headed out on to the road. This was much easier, and Gary slept soundly. The road was a dual carriage way, so I wasn't too worried about cars. However, the few cars coming along were moving quite Fast, it being about 4:30. I found it incredibly amusing to see how close they would get before they would see us and move over, and some of them were coming pretty close, to the point of having to slam on the brakes and skid around us. Gary woke up somewhere about this time, and I explained to him how funny I thought this was. I'm not sure if it was this, or the half hours sleep he had had, but he was suddenly brimming with that good old nervous energy again. He offered to push me for a while, but stressed that it had to be on the footpath. I wasn't really tired, and we decided that infact the chances of somebody stopping to pick up two hitch-hikers, one of whom was in a shopping trolley, were pretty slim.

So, we made an executive decision, and ditched the trolley. I think we walked for about an hour and a half in all, right to the other side of Midland, and to the bottom of Greenmount. We managed to hitch a lift as far as the turn off to York, at "The Lakes" Roadhouse (at least, I think thats what its called, although now I think about it, the nearest lake is at least 40 km back towards Perth...). It was here, with about 40km left to travel, that the beer and my nervous energy ran out. I remember crashing out on the hard baked-red earth, looking at the ants running around inches from my nose, and hoping that they were still too sleepy at this hour of the morning to bite me.

I think that Gary fell asleep too, but he had the presence of mind to fall asleep with his thumb out. I woke up with him shaking me, as a van had stopped and offered us a lift. They dropped us off at the little greasy roadhouse at the entrance to York, and I think it was just around 7:00. We went in for a snack (I was disappointed because they had no beer). I don't remember exactly if they were the people who had given us a lift, or just some other people who happened to be eating there, but the people at another table left a lasting impression on me. There were four of them, Mum, Dad, and two kids aged around seven and nine. They were eating something, I think it must have been soup. They were all dressed in grey, they were all looking down at their plates, and the only noises were the occasional slurp or scrape of bowl. The waitress had a face about 10 miles long as well, and I quickly decided that I should get Gary out of this place as quickly as possible. I told him to follow me, and made a break for the door. Luckily, no-one saw us, or if they did, they didn't care.

The sun was starting to come up as we walked in to town, it was cool and quiet, and the adrenal power of adventure-hitching was running to a dangerous low. We made it as far as the town park, and the nice green grass and cool shade seduced us, so it was Zed time again. I woke up a couple of hours later, to the sight of one of our Boys in Blue, disdainfully prodding Gary with a black-booted foot. Now the sight of a blue uniform when I wake up has a stunning effect on my nerve centres and adrenal glands, and in seconds, I was wide awake and full of energy, and jogged over as if I had just run three laps of the park. I sweet talked the policeman, about how we were staying in town, and just sat down to rest five minutes, with images of nationwide police bulletins about dangerous fugitive hitch-hikers in my head. So, we headed out of the park, still babbling profuse inanities to the policeman.

The next step was simply to find the others, but infact, we only had pretty vague directions, as well as a pretty vague idea of where we were to start with. Our first point of reference was Sarah's Dad's furniture shop. We found this with only a little searching, but of course, there was no-one there. Asking at a few of the shops around soon provided us with directions to Sarah's place, along with a few raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses. I don't remember seeing a mirror anywhere, but that is probably just as well.

Well, we finally made it to Sarah's at about 11:00. Quite a few of the others had already arrived, and they were just cracking open the beers.....

I never did see any Jazz during the weekend. So much for the Jazz Festival.

[1] All good hitch hiking stories should involve a backpack of beer - or for the _really_ ambitious, a plastic Jerry-Can, with a door cut in the side, full of cans of beer. No easier way to get a lift in the wilds than when carrying a jerry-can...

[2] Bogan - black muscle T-shirt with packet of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve, black jeans, black ripple-sole DBs... you get the idea.