This is a true account of a journey I once took as a young man of twenty-three years, and though at first glance it may seem insignificant by today’s jet-setting, backpacking gap-year students, it was nothing less than an immersion into events I could hardly predict. As it is often said: “fact is stranger than fiction,” as are some of the characters I met equally stranger than any I could make up. In 1973, I decided on a whim to hitchhike from my hometown of Huddersfield to Newquay, in Cornwall, following the northwest Cornish coast road. In those days this was the usual route before the completion of the M5 to Exeter, and a distance of about 375 miles. Hitchhiking was not unusual then, and I’d done it a few times before, but Newquay, so far away, was a leap of faith for me, a distance I had never taken, but felt I must. This is my memory, while it’s still there…