Hitchhiking, 1980

Back in 1980, after leaving high school, a friend and I decided we wanted to spend a few months ravelling around the US. We had very little money and thought thta hitchhiking would be a great way of travelling on the cheap. My parents must have been utterly terrified at the thought of what could happen to us, and just a few days before we were due to fly out, they went to a dinner party where they met an American couple who were over the UK for a short working visit. The wife said she had friends all over the US who would be happy to give us a bed for the night and a few days later she brought my mother a little notebook of addresses and phone numbers. We took this with us on our journey, but to be honest it seemed a bit awkward just phoning people we'd never met and telling them an old friend of theirs had given their details to someone they had just met at a dinner party and said it would be OK to come and stay. Nevertheless, we did on a couple of occasions pluck up the courage to make this embarrassing call and received some incredibly warm hospitality from families in Baltimore and later on in Raleigh NC. One morning we were hitchhiking near Durham NC and were picked up by a friendly guy who turned out to be a librarian at Duke University. He could tell from our acccents that we were from the UK and mentioned he had friends who were living over there. He even mentioned the town they were in but had difficulty pronouncing it. Coincidentally, this was our home town. He then mentioned their name and jokingly asked us if we knew them. No, we didn't know them, but these were the couple my parents had met at that dinner party a few weeks earlier. Not only that, but I had this librarian's name, address and phone number in the little note book the wife had given to my mother.