Hitchhiker thumbs rides on the Internet
EUGENE, Ore. – Luke Vaughn is a hitchhiker in the Internet age.
The University of Oregon student has spent the past month trying to get from the West Coast to the East Coast and back again. But instead of sticking out his thumb, or holding up a sign, Vaughn is getting his rides from strangers he found online.
It started as a request for a ride to Southern California for winter break. But it morphed into something much different: a cross-country challenge in which fans of a video web log known as the “The Show with Ze Frank” offered to pick him up at one location and drop him off at another, where another volunteer picks him up – a link in the coast-to-coast chain.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” Vaughn said in a cell phone interview with the Register-Guard during a layover in Minneapolis. “It’s just been a bunch of different people and a bunch of different places.”
Vaughn, a 22-year-old math major, is known online as “runningfool” or “humanbaton” on the Web pages that track his progress. He’s been a passenger in an old van, a Porsche and a Subaru Outback decked out like the Ghostbusters car.
He spends little money because he sleeps on the sofas or floors of the volunteers hitching him across the country and often gets treated to meals during a handoff or layover.
Vaughn carries a video camera with him to record the trip and wears a denim jacket on which each driver attaches a pin before handing him off to the next relay team. He’s collected so many buttons it’s hard to put the jacket on.
Vaughn is nearing the end of the monthlong quest. By the time he rolls into Eugene sometime today, Vaughn will have covered more than 10,000 miles with at least 64 separate handoffs and as many drivers.
More than 300 people have volunteered to help.
The idea, other than doing something just to prove it can be done, is to show that the Internet isn’t the electronic dark alley full of predators and scam artists it sometimes seems to those who don’t spend much time there.
“I think the Internet is a hugely positive thing and that people don’t give it enough credit,” Vaughn said in an interview on a RunningFool Web site. “This is going to be something that maybe people will look at and say that’s really cool, and that the community isn’t just a bunch of people being fake.”
Vaughn said he’s not much of a talker and tends toward shyness. When conversation lags on a ride, he naps.
But he seems to have taken to heart the advice of his older sister, who he said tells him he needs to get out more.
“When I told her (about the project) she got excited because I’m basically going to meet the entire country,” he said in the Web interview.