Always beautiful when couples find a thing to do together. They must be having an awesome relationship. Not all people are that successful in life. By far.

What happened to your overheated car? Were you able to still salvage the engine or any other parts?

I also wonder how the first one managed to frog up their communication that thoroughly!

Oh, and one very important thing I've forgotten to mention when giving long-distance hitchhiking tips... What has helped me is understanding that the drivers really have a right to not have another person in their car. It can feel fokking annoying when you're standing at the same spot for the fifth hour and still nobody stops even though they have space. But, they probably have their reasons. Maybe not everyone does, but usually they do. Learning how to say "Safe travels" in as many languages as possible has often helped me get a ride. It's gotten Romanian truck drivers at a parking place to tell me to wait and to go wake up their friend, telling them to pick me up, for example. And generally, when you get a "no" told in pantomime, it's good to nod in a friendly and affirmative way. Like "in any case, thank you for communicating, have a nice drive!" They probably have their reasons. And if they don't, then sometimes they turn their car after a few kilometres and come see if you might still be there, because you seemed like a friendly fellow. As long as you keep in mind that the people are human beings with human worries that might not be prepared to see a hitchhiker, it's understandable that they cannot make a decision in the 10 seconds they see you before they're already past you and it's "too late". Similarly, taking eye contact with the drivers and smiling helps them stop. Even if you cannot see their faces, you know where the face will be. Take a personal contact to the driver. Nod to greet, show that you take them for an individual and not just a part of a mass. It helps them shake off their own thinking of you as just one among 8 billion. Usually they cannot make the thinking process in time and, well, that's it. But often they can. 80 % of communication is non-verbal, so you can get 80 % of communication done for the time the driver can see you.

If you see a licence plate for a direction useful for you, point at it with your left hand and start waving the thumb frantically. Has worked for me a LOT of times! Communicating "I really really want specifically YOU to pick me up from this service area / roadside" is efficient, because people react better to direct communication than a generic "ladies and gentlemen, I am standing here and hoping for a ride."

And to get back to the beginning of this comment: Remember the human. They have a right for their decision not to give you a ride, and that's okay. Someone will, eventually.

That became a long reply, so I'm adding another theme here: There are plenty of hitchhikers in USA. At least BeWelcome.org has a somewhat active hitchhiking forum that you could ask for help. A reason I founded this community was that BW is a hospitality platform and not everyone who likes hitchhiking wants to be hosted by strangers and host strangers at their home, so there are people who won't join BW. And then there are a few hitchhiking groups with over 10 000 users in Mr. Sugarmountain's Foolspy-ke.

But yeah, one common thing people keep saying is that the federal law of USA actually literally forbids "hitchhiking on a roadway", which sounds like a bad thing for us. But. The same law defines the "roadway" as the area between the two hard shoulders. So, the definition does not include the actual hard shoulders. The law just means "you are not allowed to hitchhike standing in the middle of a lane". That's a "no shit, Sherlock" law something can be called that :D So, the law is not a problem. But, some policemen have only read the "forbidden on a roadway", without checking out what is considered a roadway. So you might end up in stupid situations with police over there... It's just a hurdle, not an insurmountable wall.

For all the rest about hitchhiking in USA and Chile and Canada and other places in America, and also, how to hitchhike on boats, you can read in http://hitchwiki.org/ . That's been a great help for me. Although, sometimes its articles are ridiculously badly written. The article about trains, for example went on to explain how to properly dumpster dive in some specific cities in Finland, for example O.o I cut much of that away, but then I ran out of time and had to leave the rest of the article as it was.

My budget throughout my hitchhiking year was two to three euros per day plus visa expenses. That is, about 3 to 5 Canadian dollars plus visas. I tried to keep it at two euros per day, but sometimes I felt like wanting a bit of extra luxury and went for 3. And if I sometimes had to use more than 3, I considered that a debt to repay, so I made sure to live with less money for the next days until the debt had been paid off. And, if I saved money when not "in debt", that didn't count, so it didn't give me a "right" to spend more money on the following days. I was surprisingly able to live a very fulfilling year spending under 1000 € (under 1600 Mapledollars). So, if you're able to save 3500 dollars maple, then please do go for it! And maybe you need a bit more until you reach Mexico? I don't really have much clue of prices for rice, buckwheat, millet, pasta, dried lentils and dried beans in USA... In Finland the legumes typically cost 3,5 € per kg (that is: about 1 € per kg when soaked ready to use) and good quality basmati rice is about 3 € per kg if bought in amounts sensible for a hitchhiker. But once outside EU, the prices for both of those dropped to a fraction. I don't remember any other prices, but I remember that in 2015 a kg of potatoes typically cost around 5 Ukrainian Hryvnias on a marketplace, while back then 25 Hryvnias were one euro... That means, about 15 Hryvnias were one Dollar of the Reasonable Ones. (And a local bus ticket was 2 Hrn. In Finland I'd never get a local bus ticket for the price of less than half a kg of potatoes. Or conversely, a kilogram of potatoes would never cost more than twice as much as a ride in a city bus! It's fascinating how different the prices are in relation to each other outside EU compared to EU!)

Of course, before setting off for that trip, I learned how to reliably make a fire, got a low tent of dark-green colour, because I often had to camp in places where people... would prefer me not camping. And I had an army cooking pot of the Swedish army, which doubles as a low-quality rocket stove, which is good because it produces a lot of heat from a small amount of sticks, which means there won't be much smoke and I was often able to guerrilla-cook my rice-and-lentils in a relatively shallow ditch mere 30 metres from a busy road, unnoticed :)

Ohhh, and once thing I forgot to mention: I also carried a bit of salt, a small bottle with simple cooking oil, some garlic, a small bottle of soy sauce and five to ten different types of spices. That's the reason combining just two types of carbohydrates with two types of legumes was able to yield a sensible meal each day. Every time I was cooking a meal, I chose one ingredient that I must use, and one that I am not allowed to use. And then created a meal. When you keep altering both the type of legumes you carry and the type of carbohydrate you carry, and use spices to turn them into a different food each day, you get so many permutations that you can have a meal twice a day for a year without eating the same food twice :) (remember, you can also alter the amount of a specific spice you use, not only which spice you use. And, you can keep changing your stock of spices as well. They weigh almost nothing. Tea is also a nice thing to carry around, because it weighs almost nothing, and if you can find water that becomes safe by cooking, well, tea leaves make it both instantly drinkable without a need to cool it down first, and an actually enjoyable moment during your day.

Also, do remember to take some days off. Every now and then I searched for a place with drinkable running water. Mountain creeks typically have water you can just drink out of the creek, as long as it flows fast enough and there aren't any deers or such pooping into the creek upstream, so mountains are often good places for such a time-off. And then I spent typically about 5 days in that place, just doing nothing.

I also had a small and lightweight computer, an ASUS eeePC, that had a 7-hour battery life, and I bought a charger that can charge my laptop from a 12 V socket available in every single car out there. Another tool I carried with me was a USB car charger with two USB ports. Often the driver was charging his phone or GPS or whatever using the only 12 V port, so I disconnected his plug and connected mine with two ports, so he could still charge his device and I could charge mine :)

Washing your clothes is easy if you have a plastic bag, detergent and water. Mix those in the plastic bag and keep pressing it, until the clothes inside are clear. Rinse with water (for example by putting the clothes on the bottom of a creek over the night, held down by stones) and you've got clean clothes again! Also having a small bottle of dishwashing liquid makes sense.

Ah, and one more thing I did to train for that trip: I slept several Finnish January nights on the balcony. That was a good way to test my sleeping bag arrangement. What I had with me was one very small summer sleeping bag and one standard sleeping bag. Even in January, putting the two sleeping bags inside each other was enough to keep me warm when I had all of my winter clothes on. Of course, I didn't try it at the worst frosts – just the typical January weather. Probably no colder than -10°C any night. And I made sure not to be in Kazakhstan when it gets -50°C there, so I didn't need to find a way to safely test my gear for that. If your gear is okay, then you'll wake up fresh in the morning. If it isn't, you'll wake up shivering in the middle of the night and will go to your own cosy bathroom for a hot shower, sleep the rest of the night inside in your bed and then in the morning you'll figure out what part of your body was cold and what you can do to fix that. And then you try again.

But yeah, go read Hitchwiki. About hitchhiking boats. And other stuff. It's inspiring!

Living out of a large backpack... Well, mine was excessively heavy. It's often said that 20 kg is a bit too much, 25 kg is the maximum, but already a bit stupid.

My backpack was 35 kg. That was mostly because of food. I always had two sources of carbon hydrates with me such as:

• Rice and buckwheat
• Pasta and rice
• Millet and rice. And then two sorts of legumes. The other one was usually some type of lentils and the other one was beans. I had a watertight container that I used for soaking the beans overnight (and sometimes over the day) in my backpack so that they became cookable.

And then I tried to have at least 7 litres of drinking water at all times, because I knew I'll end up in many places with seriously no drinking water available, and I wanted to have supplies for 3 days at least. When you need water for cooking and drinking and all, a bit over 2 litres per day is what at least I ended up consuming. So, my food and water was altogether quite precisely 10 kg, atop the typical 25 kg max weight. My attitude to that was that "well, if I lug this heavy thing around every day, eventually my legs will get strong enough that it won't really matter." After all, that's the difference between a 70 kg person carrying a 25 kg backpack vs. a 80 kg person carrying a 25 kg backpack. If 10 kg of body weight wouldn't matter that much, then 10 kg of backpack weight won't, either.

Of course I could have gotten myself a water filter. A really good one costs a bit over 100 €, and I'd say it might very well be worth the investment. If you're travelling for two years, that 100 € investment is 14 cents per day. Which isn't all that bad a price for usually not having to carry so much water around, really. Of course, sometimes you still do. When you're hitchhiking through the Kazakhstan steppes or the Taklamakan desert, there's not much you can do with a water filter. If there's no dirty water around, you cannot get clean water by filtering dirty water. But then again, those were just two-three weeks of my trip, all the rest of the time I could have actually made do with maybe 3 litres of water plus a filter for refilling the bottles here and there.

180 miles on bumpy, largely unpaved Burmese roads with that monster of a backpack, sitting on the back of a motorbike, was a painful experience, though. Seems to have been about 290 kilometres :))

Ah well, I will do that again – in South America. I have children, so I obviously won't fly there nor back, but when there's a will, there's a way. After my hitchhiking trip – which took me under a year because I was an idiot and caused myself to have a specific time when India had to be reached, I wasn't really able to comfortably live a city life any more, because all the things people live with are just bonkers. Useless, not bringing any happiness. I tried working, but it just felt pointless, so I went to an off-grid village, first some tens of kms outside Berlin, then to one in the mountains in northern Spain. Taught me enough Spanish that I think I'll be okay in South America for a year :) So, I think I'll be able to make that second bigger hitchhiking trip when I'm a bit under 55-year-old. Long time in the future still, but I think at that point I should still be able to pull that off. (It will devastate my pension, though, if I'm several year without work in that age... But then again, my generation probably won't be getting a pension anyhow.)

What country did this happen in?