This is s a brief introduction to the world of hitchhiking, which was my primary mode of national and international travel in my youth. It was also my favourite. But now, where have all the hitchhikers gone? There used to be queues of hitchhikers at motorway junctions and at major road roundabouts, as the British motorway network was just starting. It was my main means of national and international travel when I was a lot younger. Through hitchhiking I made my early visits from London to Bristol to visit friends with connections to the Forest of Dean, which led to my ultimate move here in the early 1970.

Before then, I had become a hardened hitcher, preferring the challenge of the open road to conventional buses and trains. Of course it saved me lot of money, but it was most interesting meeting lots of generous people with interesting stories, prepared to listen to my probably less interesting stories to take us through a long journey. From my early days in the north east of England I travelled to all my university interviews, at Southampton, London and Keele by thumb-power, and also to sports events at Manchester and London.

Hitchhiking was very popular in those days, with students (and frequently non-students) flaunting big university scarves as proof of their academic identity. There were long queues of hitchers at many important road intersection, and although I was once 15th in line, but with generous drivers I didn’t have to wait too long. When I lived in Aberdeen, I could almost guarantee that I could get to London in one day (Scottish days longer than English days in summer). I didn’t use trains or buses, but eventually became a car driver as a matter of convenience, with tens of thousands of hitched miles in my travel-box.

And in those days I managed to hitch hike a couple of European tours, to Spain and to Sicily, relying on schoolboy French and Latin, which seemed to work. Not being tied to any particular route, Barcelona, via La Rochelle, the bleak mountain state of Andorra journey was interesting. A French couple Phillipe and Nicole became my hosts at La Rochelle, now fearsomely good rugby team, but then a pretty, peaceful fishing town. The road to Sicily offered opera, mountains, lakes and Roman and Greek archaeology.

When I became a car driver, I tried to reciprocate the generosity from these hundreds of drivers. But where are the hitchhikers of today?