My spending money was very limited, so I had decided to hitchhike from Toledo, Oregon, where I was currently residing, to Seattle, Washington, to catch the plane to Manila.
My thoughts were if I could get to the market street on-ramp in Salem Oregon that I could catch a ride the rest of the way to Seattle from there. I had decided I would not accept any shorter rides from there as I didn't want to get stuck in Portland, or even someplace worse.
It took me over 2 hrs to get my first ride out of Toledo. I was getting discouraged already as I didn't think it would take me long to get my first ride. Shortly before I was picked up, another hitchhiker passed me by. I told him I had been there for hours already. He walked on.
After he was gone, a van stopped. Upon opening the door, I found the van to be full of mexicans. There were 11 of them, and there were no seats in the van. They were sprawled out all over the floor. 3 of them were playing cards, the gist of which I was never to figure out. They then stopped to pick up the other hitchhiker. I breathed a little easier then.
If any of the mexicans spoke english, they didn't let it be known. The other hitchhiker and I played a game of chess. He was a very good player, and as I was more than a little distracted, he won.
The two of us were dropped off in NW corvallis. He walked north, and I walked the 4 miles or so to Hwy 34 which would take me to the freeway.
Shortly after arriving on Hwy 34, another van stopped, and gave me a ride to the Hwy 99 turnoff, which is about 2 miles from the I-5 freeway. I then started hiking again. I hadn't gone far when a guy in a pickup stopped. The front seat was full of computer equipment, so I climbed in the back. The pickup had a passthrough window, and the guy was an old hippie type. He was jamming on old rock and roll. He passed me an orange, which I readily devoured.
Let me assure you that eating an orange in the back of a dirty pickup is not good policy. With sticky hands, everything I touched turned my hands instantly black, which in turn added additional pigmentation to my clothing almost immediately.
He dropped me off at the south Salem exit, and I then hiked the 4 miles or so to the Market street on-ramp. As I was crossing the street there, I looked up and saw at the top of a small hill a wide spot where a potential ride could stop and pick me up. I hadn't gone 100 feet toward this goal when a car with Washington license plates stopped. I asked the driver where he was headed, and he said Seattle, so in I climbed.
After several miles, traffic came to a standstill. My driver said he knew of a "shortcut" around Portland, so off we went to the west. I had previously traveled fairly extensively in this area and knew of no such shortcut, but off we went anyway.
Well, this "shortcut" cost us about 2 hours, but we did finally make it to Seattle around 10 PM. He dropped me off at my cousins house near Tacoma.
