Day 67: Oh The Humanity
June 16, 2017
South Lake Tahoe, CA
If there’s anything the last week has taught me let along the last two months is that things don’t always go according to plan. This theme continued today when I called Eastern Sierra Transit to see when and where we could catch the bus to Carson City while we were eating breakfast around 9:00. The customer service rep informed me that bus had already left for the day at 7:30 and that it won’t run again until Monday (it’s currently Friday). The whole point of going to Tahoe instead of Yosemite or elsewhere was convenience due to the public transit. Now we had to hitch 175 miles.
It’s true though. I had.
We walked to the edge of town and expected to be there for a while, but after only 30 minutes with our thumbs out a woman stopped and said she was going to Tahoe and asked if we wanted a ride. Both Glowworm and I were kind of baffled. She didn’t look like she was going to Tahoe. He car didn’t have bags or anything travel related in it so we were shocked when she confirmed that was indeed going all 3.5 hours to Tahoe. It was incredible!
Very strange moving this quickly through the landscape.
Her name was Sandra and she was from Austria and traveling around the American West for a month. We have had so much luck with hitches. Everyone that has picked us up have been the nicest, most kind people I have met out here. Everyone thinks that hitchhiking is dangerous and only total creeps will pick you up. With my experience it’s been the complete opposite.
Holy shit. Get it?
Sandra dropped us off at the Mellow Mountain Hostel in South Lake Tahoe and we got a room for the next five nights. Not yet sure how long we’re going to stay, but we figured we’d be here for at least that long and can always tack on extra nights if need be.
This place is weird, though. There’s so many people. I haven’t been in a city this large since I left San Diego to begin this hike over two months ago. It’s quite overwhelming. There’s families with screaming children with loud obnoxious parents yelling over them and recently divorced middle aged women hitting on their young waiters and you can’t jay walk without getting hit by a car and everything is expensive and there’s like actual rules and societal norms. Very strange. We couldn’t even have dinner without sound being pumped deep into my ear canals. It’s nice being away from the trail, but this will take some getting used to. It really hit me how hard it’s going to be returning to normal life when this is all said and done. Tomorrow I think we’re going to hit the beach and maybe go see a movie in the evening.
