Hitchhiking! It's so DANGEROUS! Maybe it's just my northern Californian upbringing, but I've never thought of hitchhiking as a particularly dangerous pursuit, as long as you take normal precautions. My dad travelled a lot back in his youth, and he often speaks fondly of how he'd hitchhike from place to place, usually hitching rides with vaguely hippyish, make love not war-types like himself. (Of course, this may have been because they were largely the people who would stop for him, but still.) Also, I went to high school in a little coastal town, and I used to hear a lot of my fellow students who lived around there (I didn't; I carpooled from further inland) talk about how they'd hitchhike over to the next town to go see a movie or something, then hitchhike back. I never heard any particular horror stories involving that.