GIRL TALK: Urban adventure a road less travelled

COLUMN GIRL TALK
When I was a kid, school holidays were defined by the gang wars that went down in the overgrown acre behind our house. Forts were built in council overflow drains and bare feet and stubbed toes were a rite of passage regardless of the season.
Today, with the insidious spread of modern diseases such as PlayStation and Occupational Health and Safety, it seems as though urban adventures have fallen out of favour along with leg-warmers and Alice bands.
The council drains have been fenced off because they're too dangerous, the empty sections have been covered in high-density housing and the ever-present threat of "stranger danger" has become so prevalent that he can hardly be described as a stranger any more.
Childhood as we knew it is over. Except in one family in Hastings, where a father with aspirations for adventure and the sort of long, shaggy hair that speaks of a free spirit and a frustrated ex-wife has reinvented youth the way it used to be.
I met this man on the side of the road. Having never entertained the idea of stopping for a hitchhiker in any of my 32 years on God's good earth, I pulled the car over and offered him a lift.
Although he had a very trusting look about him, it was the pint-sized accessory he had with him which saw me stop.
I'm a nosy person by nature, and a father thumbing a ride with an 8-year-old daughter in tow is a story waiting to be told.
Assuming he was short of a car and cash, I was surprised to hear from dad that in fact they had a car sitting in the garage at home but since it was the holidays and just because he could, dad was teaching his daughter how to hitchhike.
Not because he supported the idea of her doing it alone, but because it was an activity he remembered fondly from his own youth and he wanted to give her the opportunity to experience it for herself, and perhaps meet some interesting people en route.
I was immediately smitten. A dad taking his daughter for a fair-dinkum adventure had way more sex appeal than the bog-standard man pushing pram.
As he regaled me with stories of his long rides through Southeast Asia on the back of a melon truck and spanning borders in the company of friendly foreigners, I thought what a great column his story would make, and told him so. His easy smile suddenly became strained.
While it turned out dad was all for a bit of old-fashioned education, apparently mum might be less supportive of his daughter hitching rides with strangers all over the countryside.
This was a daddy/daughter secret ... a fact which no doubt only made him more of a hero in her eyes.
Always keen to be in on a secret and blessed with an inability to remember anyone's name two seconds after I'm told it, I assured the pair their identities would remain anonymous.
Inspired by this real-world educational excursion and running early for the first time in recorded history, I dropped the highway hikers right to their door.
As I wished them well on their next urban adventure, it occurred to me that I had just had mine: my very first experience collecting a hitchhiker.
I felt a wee buzz and assumed that's what dad was angling for and had undoubtedly achieved with his daughter.
But what he had also given her was a window into the past, to a world where it was safe to stick out your thumb for a lift, and people had more time and more compassion to propel them to pull over. And that's a party trick PlayStation will never pull off.