New Year's Eve - Hitchhikers Head Back to Slab City, California

For the 4th straight year, hitchhikers will be making their way from across the USA -and even Canada- to Slab City, an off-the-grid squatters community in the deserts of Southern California, by the Salton Sea. One of the first things you see coming into this 'city' just a few miles east of Niland is Salvation Mountain, Leonard Knight's hillside creation of painted gospel messages. Past that is a sea of RVs and mostly friendly old-timers, but stick around long enough and you'll meet all kinds of travelin' folk, young and old.

Diehards stick around year-long, such as Builder Bill- creator of outdoor music venue, The Range. Here most every winter weekend you can enjoy music of the jam-band variety. Got an instrument, get up on stage and join the band!

Hitchhikers set up camp at The Tanks, next to the S.P.A.Z. crew, or at The Bunkers. Camping free out in the desert, they swap stories and share hitchhiking resources around the campfire, ambling down Main Street to talk it up with the locals or catch some music from Insane Wayne and the gang.

Planning to head out to The Slabs this year? Hitchhikers, RVers and road trippers can get directions to Slab City and Niland here. Want to see what else goes on? Check out digihitch's Slab City page, or Slab City on MySpace. Other pages with photos and info include www.desertdutch.org and www.slabcity.org

Let us know you're coming! Visit the official New Year Hitchhiker Happening homepage with details and discussions.

Thumbs Up Australia - Hitchhiking the Outback

Author Tom Parry contacted us a few weeks ago about promoting his new book, Thumbs Up Australia - Hitchhiking the Outback and sent us a few copies to give away to our digihitch members. It's a good read about a British bloke and his French girlfriend who wing it down under for a season, meeting the locals and tramping through Outback towns that most people just breeze by in busses.

With all the winter travelers heading south, we decided to do a southbound for the winter theme on the digihitch frontpage, with special listings of all the places lo-budget travelers go, including Mexico, Southwest USA, Southeast Asia and, of course- Australia. Parry also offered up a Australia hitchhiking description for our pages.

We added some winter travel book recommendations in our digihitch aStore - check em out!

Look for more word about the giveaway on digihitch this week. We also have hitchhiking books by Irv Thomas, Kinga Freespirit and Joe Mack to gift to a few lucky travelers. You may not be able to pack em all for the road, but they're good off-road reading.

digihitch.com in the blogosphere and bookmarkorama

digihitch.com has now been around over 5 years and we're glad to see all the hitchhikers, freight hoppers and road trippers coming in from the road to join us.

The site has been at the top of google.com search listings for the word 'hitchhiking' (and others, like road culture) for a while now, but we want to make it easier for our road brethren to find us. We're now hooked up with del.icio.us, technorati, myspace, furl, digg, Yahoo My Web and a slew of others. Wherever you happen to find us on the web- create an association or give an add, tag, bookmark or feed read. We'll keep the good stuff from the road coming!