FREE RIDES AND BEDS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 220, 31 August 1932, Page 10

FREE RIDES AND BEDS

WALKED ONLY FIFTY MILES. ENGLISHMAN’S LONG TREK. An overlander’s record has surely been created by Charites Sampson, an Englishman from the Isle of Wight, who left Toowoomba, Queensland, in the middle of June, without a penny, and completed the 1.460 miles’ journey to Melbourne on August 6 without having earned a penny on the way. Of that long distance he walked only 50 miles. Private cars gave him lifts for the rest of the long trek. Sampson would have been in Melbourne a month sooner if he had not been laid up in hospital at Liverpool (N.S.W.), ironically enough, with a bad foot!

Only on one day during the journey south did he fail to get a lift by car. On that day he walked the 22 miles between Port Macquarie and Kew (on the New South Wales coast). He was equally lucky in the matter of food and beds. Hotefe on the route provided for him when he told the proprietors he was walking to Fremantle to try to work his passage home to England. His only refusal of free accommodation was at Seymour, where he arrived by car from Wigga. He then appealed •to the police sergeant. The sergeant told him that rhe only place he could give Lini was the lock-up cell and, as

he waa expecting a drunk or two during the evening, he might have to leave his lodging in the niiddle of the night. Sampson decided to .take the risk, was locked jn by the sergeant and slept soundly until the morning. Sampson has the toughest part of the journey still to do in the stretch between Adelaide 1 and Fremantle, but he is optimistic. Visions of home are tantalising him.