There is an old joke about a hitchhiker whom, when offered a lift on an out-of-the-way highway, asks the driver if he was nervous about picking up strangers. ‘After all,’ said the hitchhiker, ‘I might even be a serial killer’. The driver responded calmly that ‘he was not nervous in the least, because the odds of two serial killers meeting up on some lonely backroad had to be astronomical’.

The odds of my meeting up with Neville Jacob back in 1979 was certainly astronomical. I was a struggling college student from Phoenix Arizona, and Neville was just months away from starting his first University term at the University of Canterbury at Kent. The two of us had grown up in vastly different environments; Neville was raised in rural Cheshire (near Macclesfield), with just one sibling. Neville later attended boarding school striving toward his eventual University acceptance. I had grown up in poverty as one of seven children in a tiny little 3-bedroom Arizona home, and I did not necessarily have a university attendance high on my to-do list.

Life happens, and my plan had been to join the US Navy upon High School graduation. That opportunity never materialized, and I found myself attending a small Arizona Community College. With a love for the mountains of Northern Arizona, an opportunity to work as a Youth Counselor for a YMCA Summer Camp in Prescott Arizona during summer holiday came up and I jumped at the opportunity.

The summer YMCA youth camp traditionally employed an international Counselor each year. The intention may have been to gift the camp with a more rounded world flavor. It was fate for me then that Neville, prior to attending hist first term at university, accepted the international Counselor position at the very same camp that hired me. Though growing up on separate continents and in quite diverse backgrounds, a four-decade friendship spawned in Ponderosa Pine country in the Bradshaw Mountains near Prescott Arizona.

Prior to attending that YMCA Camp, Neville had previously travelled in South Africa and France. So, he already had a leaning toward international adventure. Meanwhile, my desire for joining the Navy had been driven by an expressed hope of getting out and ‘seeing the world.’  I had previously been employed by the U.S. Forest Service and had worked with youth adventure camps and Boy Scouts, so I had deep set adventurous tendencies of my own to quench. Thereby, it was only natural for the two of us, quickly becoming friends, and desiring to see more of the World, to team up in that endeavor. After camp wrapped for the summer, we decided to extend our travels throughout the States.

And so, our adventure began.

In late summer of 1979, after 2 months working at the YMCA Camp, we set off to explore the western United States. Neither of us had huge funds to tap into, and we did not have any proper means of transportation at that time in our lives. So, we extended out our thumbs and hitch-hiked through Arizona and California. We hopped a freight train and visited Utah and Colorado. From Colorado we both returned to our respective homes in time to start back at school.

The following summer, both of us decided to do a second summer employed at the very same YMCA camp; this followed by an even grander scale hitch-hiking trip once the gig at the YMCA we completed. For the second trip, we hitched from Arizona through California, then through Oregon, then Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska. Leaving Alaska, we crossed the length of Canada and closed the loop in New York State, from whence we both returned to our respective homes separately. Besides using our thumbs, during that second adventure we also employed the Alaskan Ferry network and even more trains in our long cross-country trek.

Neville kept a journal that he jotted notes in on both trips. He also took a handful of terrific photos on our journey. And upon our trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas we gathered signatures of everyone who stopped to give us a lift. Even the Ferry Boat Captain added his signature to our Rand McNally. The journal, the map signatures, even the photos are all fantastic historical records of our months together exploring the North American Continent. But in no way are those records able to tell our complete story of all our trials and adventures. This blog is intended to close some of the gaps in the record.  But even more than that, my intention for this blog is to record even more or our adventures as we travel together on new adventures. I do not believe either of us are ready to sheath our traveling ‘thumbs’ and calm our travelling spirits just quite yet. May these pages testify to that.

Cheers, nca