For 20 weeks, from May to October, 2016, two young Brits – Lilly and Sarah – traveled to all 48 mainland U.S. states, 39 cities and covered more than 13,650 miles – without spending a penny.

Sarah kept a blog called, “Pretenniless.” Their plan was to hitchhike, dumpster dive, couch surf and whatever else was needed to complete their goal: after setting foot on U.S. soil, they would spend no money or accept no monetary gifts. She kept a counter on the front page of her website to account for every penny spent on the journey.

Sarah and Lilly met in early 2013 in a bar in New Delhi. They bonded immediately over pints of beer and a shared love of seeing the world. When they’d both returned to Britain in 2014, on a lark, they hitchhiked from London to Edinburgh to have a beer. Almost three years later, they set off on their next big adventure…

Why? (according to Sarah): “I was born healthy to a loving family. I’ve been provided for and protected, educated and supported and I think it’s fair to say I don’t really have much of an idea of true hardship – I’m lucky to be able to say that is true for the vast majority of my friends and family too. I’m also lucky that my parents are great parents, who have always strived to ensure we are aware of our luck and grateful for all we have. No matter what though, there’s still a sense of personal naivety that comes from living in the luck bubble and I want to make sure I challenge that naivety as often as I can throughout my life. I am lucky that I haven’t experienced hardship, but that doesn’t mean I deserve to be blind to the hardships others face. Opening myself up to meeting others on the road will, just maybe, give me a glimpse into the different lives we all live.”

Why? (according to Lilly):  “Part of the appeal for me is the danger: I feel like I’m taking back responsibility for my life, getting out of my comfort zone, using my common sense and gut feelings to judge whether a situation is dangerous, judging people’s characters and ultimately if we do get in a pickle, getting out of it and feeling a sense of accomplishment in doing so. People jump out of planes to get an adrenaline rush. For me this is my rush, it makes me feel alive.”

Their story is fascinating to me – as a female who did something similarly gutsy about 40 years ago. But I was traveling in southeast Asia, not the U.S., and it was back in the late 70s, not 2016. A different time, a different place. Here are snippets of the story from Sarah’s blog:

On hitchhiking:

“The hitcher is scared of the driver, and the driver is scared of the hitcher. ‘They just want to murder me’ is the singular thought in anyone’s head.” She acknowledged that they were more at risk than a man would be, but they were often picked up because the driver wanted to ‘protect’ them. “It’s a small, twisted upside to an otherwise unequal slice of culture.”

Resources:

“Beyond providing us with the ability to buy knock-off Chinese camera batteries and get Oreos delivered at 3am, the internet can have some amazing uses. Here, we’ve listed our favourites for budget travel.”

Couchsurfing, Craigslist, SleepingInAirports.net and FallingFruit.org. In a couple of instances, they desperately posted their plight on Tinder, the dating app – and got some interesting offers …

On our shared connection – my step-daughter, Erica:

“I met Erica on the roof of a hostel in Thailand over three years ago, and we’ve traveled to, and met in various countries ever since. Luckily for us, Californian Erica worked the summer as a tour guide and happened to be leading a group through Las Vegas just as we were there… A night of drinking, a party bus, Fremont Street, the Las Vegas sign and a club at the Cosmopolitan later, we were very happy (very hungover) bunnies.”

About a place that impressed her in Denver:

“The SAME Cafe – ‘So All May Eat’ – is based on the simple principle that you can either pay with your money or your time. If you have money, then you can pay for your meal (as much or as little as you can, with a suggested donation of $5), if you have a larger amount of money you can pay for someone else to have a meal too, and if you have no money at all you can volunteer 30 minutes of your time in the cafe in return for your food. And my god, the food is good.”

For 10 years the SAME cafe has been open for 6 days a week, offering not just meals to those who need them but healthy, delicious meals given in a happy, safe, vibrant cafe in the heart of Denver. It’s a place where vulnerable people in Denver can go, safe in the knowledge that they will receive a good meal in a clean place – one that doesn’t make them feel outside, or different, or shamed – since other people are enjoying meals in just the same way, regardless of ability to pay. In our short time working in the cafe, we saw people from all walks of life – schools, families with their children, young people, old people, homeless people, affluent looking people… 

Bad Experiences?

Sarah didn’t go into detail, but they obviously had at least one negative experience involving a couple of truckers. Rather than dwell on it, or let it taint their experience, they used it as a learning opportunity: “I think this week we learned a lot about ourselves, how positive we are as people and how we are able to talk through a bad situation and leave it behind us, acknowledge it as an isolated experience and not let it effect the trip going forward. We refuse to let one person’s actions taint the phenomenal kindness and generosity we’ve experienced from everyone else we’ve met in America. We refuse to travel in fear!”

I love that last line!!

Emergencies?

Throughout the journey, the girls had speculated about what it would take to break down and spend any money. What would constitute a medical emergency? They jokingly concluded that an ambulance would be summoned only in the event of a beheading!

Hitching from Dallas to Waco, Texas (in August), Sarah was bitten by a fire ant. Immediately, she developed allergic symptoms. After taking a Benadryl, she still questioned if the hives, swelling, dizziness, itching, burning and tightness in the chest really warranted medical attention – or should just wait it out on the side of the road? They wondered, if they had to spend money at the hospital, would they have failed?

Fortunately, before leaving Britain they had invested in travel medical insurance for emergency care, finding a policy that did not disallow hitchhiking. So they got Sarah to the hospital in the nick of time, got her the care she needed and still had spent no money.

On the goodness of strangers:

Arriving one evening in Gold Beach, Oregon, they went to a pizza place at closing time and asked if they had any pizzas they would be throwing away. The manager said no. As the girls set off down the road in the dark, a car approached them from behind and a lady opened her door with a pizza box. She had seen what happened in the pizza place and hoped to catch up with them to give their leftovers. “It was still warm and so garlicky and pizza has never ever tasted so good.”

At the Grand Canyon, they got a ride through a rideshare posting in Craigslist. “Abel treated us like family the whole day and we had such a great time. When we said goodbye at the end, Abel presented us both with dream catchers he had secretly bought, to keep us safe on the rest of our travels.”

Anything really weird?

In Las Vegas, they were shown to a guest bedroom: a dark room with velveteen walls, a cast iron four-poster bed and a wide array of whips, chains and fluffy handcuffs tied to the posts. The sheets were black satin. But the hosts were lovely people!

Serendipity

They wanted to go to the Grand Canyon. Recognizing that it would be more logical to go to Flagstaff instead, from where they could book a day trip, they remembered Mike, who they had met hitchhiking in Maine on Week One. Mike had said he had a friend in Flagstaff. Bingo! So they ended up staying with the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend they met weeks before and thousands of miles across the country.

Other statistics:

1 Salsa Class, 2 Mountains Summited, 1 Baseball Game (GO CUBS!), 1 Comic Con, 2 Lost Hoodies (both Sarah’s), 1 Vegas Party Bus, 1 Limo Ride, 8 Found Items of Clothing, 1 Bottle of Veuve Cliquot Champagne, 1 ER Visit, 1 Club Eviction, 1 Fight Broken Up (Not us!), 1 Jar of Moonshine, 2 Stays in a Squat, 5 Cop Car Run-ins (6 if you count the cop we hitchhiked with!), 1 Acro-yoga class, 2 Festivals, 1 Trump Rally, 28 Free Krispy Kreme Donuts and 7,835,627 Sexual Propositions!

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I’d love to meet Sarah and Lilly one day to learn more about how this amazing adventure changed them – like my experience changed me so many years ago – and set me off on a life trajectory that I could never have imagined.

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Comments?  What’s the gutsiest thing you’ve ever done when traveling?