No Such Thing as a Free Ride?: A Collection of Hitchhiking Tales, North American Edition

by Simon Sykes, Tom Sykes

In this entertaining volume, you'll find Governor General Award-winner Margaret Avison and American sci-fi novelist Piers Anthony rubbing shoulders with Blag Dahlia and Ben Bachelder. You'll read of Jello Biafra's encounter with shoe-eating cows, Alan Dean Foster's ride on a whale shark, and Kage Baker's hilarious account of actors broken down on Interstate 5. Filmmakers, politicians, stand-up comedians, poets, journalists, and carpenters all come together through the shared experience of hitching a ride. Throughout the '60s and '70s — the heyday of hitchhiking — this form of travel was a key means of transportation. Today, people continue to hitchhike all over the world. Money never changes hands, but all manner of social transactions take place. Hilarious, sad, nostalgic, sometimes scary, and always entertaining, these travelers' tales will open your eyes and take you back — or forward. Just when you think you've heard it all, turn the page. You'll discover you haven't!

Genres: Travel

200 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2005

About the author

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Reviews

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This compilation of (mostly) true narratives delves a bit into the hitchhiking mystique, mixing the good with the bad, the tales of good fortune among the incredulous horror stories.

There were a few selections that seemed a bit out of place, but perhaps that's to be expected when the idea of 'place' in this collection is so transient, just as the narrators themselves.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a edited compilation of hitch hikers tales from famous and well known people. There is a right mix of styles and lengths of pieces as you would expect, from a paragraph to several pages.

Overall it is not too bad, and the sectioning mostly makes sense, but these could have been reduced to three or four.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, some of these were super outrageous and others totally cracked me up. Gotta love good ol' hitchhiking stories. It's a shame that people are super timid about picking them up nowadays.

[David Pannett · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amusing read which brought back many memories of hitching around the UK and Europe during the '60s.