Koral Alexander is gorgeous, or at least she is one third gorgeous. She’s the guitar and vocal third of Florida based party punk band, Gorgeous, to be exact. I met her in a cafe in Santa Rosa where she was making a quick pit-stop with her friend Rachel. The pair of them had hitch hiked from Florida to California in a thumb powered journey that had taken them two months.

As they told my friend Erin and I about some of their hitch-hiking adventures, I have to admit I got a little caught up in the romantic notion of a life on the road. The idea of catching a ride with interesting people sounded fun to me. However, the idea of having to find shelter from the rain, then come up with a ‘plan B’ for the night because you couldn’t catch a ride, that didn’t sound quite as romantic.

In the end their ‘plan B’ turned out to be taking Erin up on her kind offer of a warm meal and a place to stay for the night. It’s unclear where they would have stayed, had Erin and her boyfriend Jon, not been so hospitable. Koral mentioned something about walking down the deserted rail road tracks and I meant to ask her what she thought that might have to offer. Maybe it’s a thing, a trick in the hitch-hikers handbook of travel hacks perhaps?

So this morning we all ate a slow breakfast together, and I took this picture of Koral’s knuckle tatoo. As we ate crispy bacon, eggs and pancakes, the pair of them told us stories about their travels, and times working on farms not far from here. They’re heading south in the coming days, going home for the holidays. Back to Florida, where the year round sun seems especially appealing as a wet spell continues to hang around in this rapidly cooling Northern Californian winter.

I asked if they were going to take a bus back, or maybe a train. It’s a long way back to Florida and Christmas is less than a month away now. Koral dismissed the idea and put out her thumb. “It got us here, it can get us back,” she said, and of that I have no doubt.