Creed Bratton is a musician and actor who starred in The Office.

My senior year in college, I was in a drama class and did a scene. It just wasn’t going right. I’d been getting so much good response from my acting through high school and junior college. Now, I was at a state college with a coach that had a good reputation and it wasn’t flying like I wanted it to. He said, “You just need more life experiences. I’d recommend, when you're through here, go off to Europe, get some life experiences.” It resonated so strongly with me that I sold my Austin-Healey. I told my buddy, “Hey, why don’t we go to Europe? I’m selling my car, I’ll pay your way over on this freighter.” Our girlfriends—kind of reluctantly, or I don't know how they felt about it at the time because I was too excited about going—drove us to Needles, California.

We put up our thumbs in the road. The very first car that stops to pick us up is going to Louisiana. New Orleans, that’s where we were going. He took us all the way there. Then we got on the freighter that I paid for. In Europe, within a short period of time, we were out of money. We started stowing away on trains. We went up to Scandinavia. We’d get on trains and we’d hide. We’d move around and try to stay ahead of the guys collecting the tickets. It was kind of a game. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Right now, I would never do that, obviously. Well, Creed, the character, might, but not me, the person.

I get to Germany. My buddy leaves after eight days there. He misses his girlfriend. He’s jealous. He thinks she's with another guy, which it turns out she was. So he flies back. Now I'm broke, so I work in Munich and I meet two guys outside an American Express. They’re singing in the streets there. I end up with them, we started hitchhiking. Now, we've got guitars, rucksacks, and long hair, starting to look pretty disreputable. We hitchhiked from Munich all the way to Gibraltar.  

We were buskers. We played in railway stations, we played outside cinemas. Then we got better. We started booking gigs in clubs. With hitchhiking, if you have music, you have a guitar, and you can sing for your supper, people bring you in and put you in a back room. We'd sing and they’d feed us. We put on an improv concert on the beach for a bunch of villagers in Gibraltar. Two days later, we’re sleeping in the caves and all of a sudden, this mariachi band came up with all the villagers. They serenaded us, which woke us up. Things like that, you can't buy. 

We stayed in Tangiers for a while, then we hitchhiked down to Fez. There were little towns. We got into some trouble. I got stoned out of one town. We got attacked by some wild dogs once, but other than that the Americans were okay. You really have to have your intuition attuned, so that when the car pulls up, you look in there and you suss out the situation ASAP. You let your intuition say is this going to be safe? And if you feel like your guardian angels are there with you, and you're gonna be protected, then you can proceed. You can trust your gut on this stuff. But if there's any doubt, if you have any trepidation or doubt, I certainly would suggest people don't do it.

One ride in Algeria, he was kind surely. He said “Get in, get out, go, come, fuck, I don't care.” Oh, all right, I'll get in the truck. All of the sudden, we're driving along and then he goes, "Okay, out." And it's in the middle of fucking nowhere. Luckily, there's only one road going down the coast. But still, he takes off into the fucking desert on this road. I say, "Well, fuck me." So I spent a couple of days sleeping on the fucking side of the road. I had a bag with water in it. It tasted like wine, but thank God I had water in it. I stayed there until somebody picked me up and got back on the main road and then I got to Libya. 

I always felt at the time I was protected by guardian angels, for want of a better word. It was fate and this was my destiny and this is what I was supposed to be doing. It turned out, it was the best thing I had ever done.

We made a bunch of money in Libya, playing at this hotel, and we signed up for a little tour with Mobil Oil. They flew us about 500 miles out in the Sahara Desert, we went all over the place there. We got all the way over to Cairo and we had money, so we took a boat to Beirut. We hitchhiked from Beirut to Israel, but we couldn't get through the Mandelbaum Gate. We didn't have enough money by then. So we had to hitchhike back to Beirut, work at the KitKat club for a while to make enough money. Then we hitchhiked back. In the interim, we went to Cedars of Lebanon.

Then I got my draft notice, because I was out of college. They told me that I had to report to Berlin, to the army base there. We had just worked on this film in Israel called Cast a Giant Shadow, and I fell in love with the director's daughter. We went to the Greek islands. Then she went back to LA, I hitchhiked from Greece to Berlin. That time, it was Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. We came in through East Berlin, through the backdoor. We had to wait in the car until there was enough people there lined up. And then we had military escorts that took us all the way through the line of cars. They took us over to the west. And then the military came through the gate, they checked our passports and let us through. 

Then I went to the military base. Luckily for me, my father died in the war, he was an officer, and I had a broken eardrum. I had two strikes against me, so I didn't have to go. Then I hitchhiked back to Munich again, where I had met the guys in the first place. I met up with them again. We played Oktoberfest, our second one. We had a routine going now. And then we went to Paris and played and then England. We separated then. The banjo player went back to America and the gut string guitar player went to Scandinavia. 

I stayed there in England and ended up weighing about 145 pounds, just starving. And then I went back. I flew back from Reykjavik to New York. On the flight, I met this guy. He'd been buying cars in Germany. He said if I want to split the gas with him, I'd do half the driving while he slept and we'd drive non-stop to L.A. And that's what we did. 

Then I hitchhiked from Los Angeles back up to see my stepdad and my mom. I was born in Los Angeles, but when I was two we moved up to a little town called Coarsegold, California. It had about 300 people and it was up on the road out of Fresno, below Yosemite National Park, in the foothills where gold was found back in the day. Now I had the full hippie regalia, long hair and stuff. As I was coming to Fresno, several people pulled over and wanted to beat the shit out of me. I realized at this time, it was getting really dangerous. I felt physically threatened.

Things were changing, and people couldn't keep up with it. They didn't want things to change. Anything that's symbolic of change, like the music or the long hair or the clothes, it's fearful to the status quo. And I think that's why they get angry. It's not that they're bad people. They're just fearful, that's all. That was the last time I ever hitchhiked.

(This story initially appeared on the Hitchhike podcast.)

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