These are the notes from 2003 I believe. Me as a novice Traveller:.

I am a hitchhiker.  In the past year I've been from san diego to daytona beach to san fransisco to seymour indiana to seattle to boston massachusetts.  Right now i’m in uhhh... I don’t even know, the state next to new jersey. Pennsylvania I think. Today was a good day, but in this lifestyle, most of them are.  My goal is to get to cali and I really have no time schedule, so yesterday when I was in jersey trying to go west and a ride offered to take me into coney island new york, backtracking a lot, I agreed, going for my first trip into new york city.  He was some dude who was infatuated with new york city, because he had just recently moved there. He kept pointing out landmarks like the empire state building and the statue of liberty. We drove across staten island and the longest suspension bridge in the world to coney island, right up to the ghettoest amusement park in the world.  Of course it was home to the cyclone, the oldest wooden roller coaster in the country. After my ride dropped me off to go visit dr. wilde, his dentist, I made a straight beeline for that ride. I love amusement parks and roller coasters, and even though it was five bucks, The coaster was well worth it. Then I walked through brooklyn, watching the locals taunt each other.  Raised on violence and street crime, these were not my type of people and I was out of my element. don’t get me wrong, I’m far from racist. I believe in equality for all and I hate the way government systems fuck over certain groups of people, it’s just that i’m a corn-fed country boy from the safe fields of cow-country wisconsin, and even though i’ve been on the road a while now, ghettos still scare me shitless.  I’m not really that big of a pussy, it’s actually more like an uncomfortable nervousness.

    A lot of my decisions are based on the flip of a coin; heads or tails, stay or move;  heads or tails, left or right. So when the coin told me to get on a bus, I obeyed. After a short ride and a chat with the driver who told me how to get to the train, I walked on, deeper into the ghetto.  I saw two fights, one real with a group of young men cheering as two guys pummeled each other, and the other fight which appeared to be just two homies messing around with each other. At one point while I was walking, a few big guys on a porch started calling out to me, trying to get me to walk over by them.  My spidey senses tingled, and I kept on walking, ignoring the calls. I felt like a wuss, but all my life I have heard stories about people in new york getting mugged or raped, and I have no desire to be part of that statistic.

Burger king has really gross food right now, uck.  

    So anyway, I hopped back on the bus system, and rode around for a while, talking to the drivers and a few locals trying to find the best way out of new york city.  I took a train to a ferry and the ferry to manhattan. Never in my life will I forget the manhattan skyline view from that night. Brilliantly lit up, like nothing I had seen or have seen since, Everyone should see new york at least once in their life, just for that view.  Then I jumped back on a subway to forty second street. Which I had no idea was Times Square until I got there. Now that shit was cool. I was not expecting to like anything in new york, but Times square was like all of vegas compacted into one big city block minus the gambling and extreme desert heat.   It was really cool, but my only goal was to get out of new york, so I bought a bus ticket to newark new jersey and slept next to a bench and a bunch of old homeless people. There were cop cars parked nearby, but if other homeless people could sleep here, so could I right? Right. So I slept till about noon, and walked two miles to the new jersey turnpike, where today began.

    I walked up the turnpike a little ways until I saw the green sign posted that said hitchhiking prohibited, so I backtracked and luckily was able to hop into the first vehicle, a truck actually in line waiting to turn.  

    Twenty six year old matt was raised in new jersey, but now was visiting on business from ohio where he currently lives.  His brother just got out of marine boot camp with some kind of cold, which matt apparently caught. He was on his way to the doctor, so I hung out in east orange new jersey while he went into the building.  Twenty minutes later he came outside and told me the doctor wasn’t there yet. So we walked to the bank as he pointed out the new parts to the small city, things that hadn’t been there when he was growing up.  buildings mostly, but also, brick sidewalks that effectively turned four lanes into two. then we went to the doctors office. And waited. About forty five minutes later he has his doctor’s appointment, and leaves with three new prescriptions.  So we drove around a bit, picked up his druggie best friend, who was very cool and had a plastic bottle filled with gangaa juice, and the three of us swung over to matt’s parent’s place to chill with the younger marine brother for a bit.

    That house was pretty average, lots of dvd in the basement and two fish tanks.  One tank had around twenty goldfish and one large, very pissed off looking piranha.  the big fish was swimming around rapidly and chasing the little ones around without eating them.  The three guys kept commenting on how the piranha was acting crazy and usually it just floated around calmly.  weird.

    So we all piled in the truck and drove to a local pizza joint, Roman something, where matt treated us to lunch.  I had a spinach roll and a thick slice of sicilian pizza, and he got me another slice for the road. Awesome, awesome dude.  

Then we drove west for a while, to a town called warren, and hung out at this awesomely designed house on a three acre lot inherited by stoners.  I met their friend ketterick, who smoked me up a little. Then for a while we ripped his jeep around in the front and back yard, tearing up the grass a lot, and yelling out the windows.  We chased the guy on the lawn mower around for a bit and laughed hysterically. It was heart-pumping fun, doing donuts on the big lawn.

    Also the house was very cool, it was like a big ass mansion with three floors and a music studio in the basement.  We hung out there for about an hour, and then matt drove me one more mile to the on ramp going west into pennsylvania.  A trucker picked me up and we drove for an hour before the flashing red and blue lights of the law lit up behind us and we got pulled over.  The cop never even asked my name, and the trucker got a ticket for a hundred and forty dollars. As we drove away, bill the driver said that was a good thing because the fines coulda been over a thousand with all the violations he really had. As the sun slowly went down into the sky he dropped me off at an intersection and I immediately went to the ramp with my thumb out for a ride.  Within ten minutes a police officer showed up, ran my name, and told me that solicitation of a ride was illegal in pennsylvania. Then he let me go. I got a ride for another twenty minutes from a mexican guy named Emmanuel. He had a mexican flag hanging on the rearview mirror and a hard green interior dashboard inside the big station wagon. He had just got off work from the restaurant and was going home to his wife and kids.  He dropped me off at a ramp with nothing there, So I started walking. and walking. and walking. I followed the highway for miles, until finally at four a.m. I fell asleep behind a dumpster at mcdonald's. I had walked back there to look for some cardboard, and I was so exhausted that I just threw a huge cardboard sign on the big space behind the dumpster on the ground, laid on top of it, and passed out.    

    At around seven thirty an employee woke me up and politely asked me to leave, which I did., walking over to the truck stop on the other side of the highway.  After a quick wash up in the bathroom I threw away my t-shirt and changed into the clean one. I walked up to where the trucks exit sign was and the second  truck to drive by picked me up. His name was gus, he was an ex-hippy who had been to prison three times for drug use. He told me about how he used to smuggle wetbacks into this country illegally.  I spent all day riding with him, (most of it sleeping on the mattress in the back of his truck) I’m at waffle house in kansas right now about to eat some real food.yippee! real food! Here’s a typical day for me, I wake up from wherever i am and walk to the nearest road or freeway and stand there with my thumb in the air until some nice or crazy stranger invites me into their vehicle and drives me as far as they are willing to go.  I engage in simple conversations and mindless chit-chat. Usually these people offer some interesting advice or a new perspective on things I thought I understood. Then they drop me off and I repeat the process over and over all day until I get tired, at which point I find six feet by three feet of clean space to lay down and sleep on. Last night i was in missouri actually, just outside of kansas. I slept in a building that had no roof and only a partial floor.  It was dusty so I scrounged up some cardboard and slept on that in my own private half house. It was cool