To add stories or send pictures please email me - I will get a bulletin board up soon so it is easier to write at the site.

September 28: Mike recovers Happily Homeless and the Casio Files and sends it in by email!

September 13: Jews, Arabs join as 'blood brothers'

First week of September: hitchhikemike.com message board

August 14: therealhhmike@yahoo.ca
I quit being a garbage man cause my knee hurts! I bought a house in Willingdon alberta for $1000 am working on fixing it up. doing demolition work saving supplies
all my love mike

July 11, 12: rabbired@jewishstudiesinstitute.org

The first time I saw Mike Gitelman was in Israel, sometime in the 80's. I was on my way to becoming a rabbi but i had a lot of counterculture stuff in me that made me different from the rest of the pack. I would go to the local Israeli record stores and look for old albums like the who and black sabbath and the dead....as i turned the corner one day on ben yehuda street there was a guy playing a guitar for money. he looked wild and impervious to what most people would think. Mike was playing neil young. I said, wow, there is a fellow canadian (I was born in vancouver) I have got to invite this guy back to my house. I gave him my address and then went out to do some errands... .when I got back to the apartment he was sitting in my living room....he had figured out a way into the building and the flat. This was the beginning of a long and strange journey, which would take me eventually to santa cruz (the first time ever I defied my parents and head out on the road), to my first grateful dead concert. mike was about to open my eyes......... more to follow.

"mike's parents visited israel at some point, and I felt that they did not approve of our friendship. I realize that mike was wild as hell and that i was probably less so, but I tghink they knew we were both sort of kindred spirits and thus maybe up to 'no good' together. my feeling was that mike was a work of art in progress and that only he knew the path to his own self-realization. in fact, let me say, mike may or may not be the most moral person in the world (I am not offering an opinion on this) but he is a man with tremendous integrity. I trust a person with integrity more than a person with morals. Mike's vision of life flows from within, whereas there are plenty of dissatisfied moral people who are not true to any personal inner dream or vision."

July 21:
"At some point Mike left Israel to go off to Europe, and I got serious with my studies. I did not hear from him till he called me from somewhere on the road. I decided to go home to los angeles, but my heart was ready for a new adventure. I called mike and asked him to meet me in LA. We took my old mustang convertable and drove up to Santa Cruz. I actually take credit for turning mike on to the dead. I think it began in Israel and definately solidifeied in california. Mike, of course, too his passion for the dead to new limits. We did not have a place to sleep (other than the car), so we went up to the gorgeous campus of the University of Santa Cruz and pitched a tent. It was dark and hard to see exactly where we were. We were awoken in the wee hours of dawn by a police officer; it seems we had pitched our tent on the provost's lawn....."

June: Happy phone call

Mike just bought a cheap pickup and a $1500 piece of land with a small house that needs lots of work. The town is about an hour out of Edmonton in a farming area and is so small there isnt even a police station. He was amused that the town has the same name as where the animals live in Animal Farm. He drives garbage trucks for good money in Edmonton after getting his large vehicle certificate and thinks it would be fun if his friends joined him to set up a moshav in rural Alberta!

April 7:Email from Mike

jono! way to go bud! I'm in Edmonton driving garbage truck without an e mail adress. garbage truck is fun! I'm so sorry I missed your wedding; I spent many days trying. Thanks for the beautiful site! I got my truck driving licence and can now travel with pay. I spent time back at the tree house and took more pictures but they were all too dark. Find neat stuff in garbage. Love you lots; your dear friend and website star,
Hitch Hike Mike

March 10-18, 2001 Put The Happy Trails Of Hitch Hike Mike! on the web and scanned some pictures for the gallery section. Digitized Weird Homes TV segment about Mike's treehouse (that's going to take a while to get on the web). Installed AXS 2.0 web tracking scripts to see who visits. Started submitting to the search engines

Checkout who is visiting at ax-admin.

September 5, 2000 - started a simple home page.

Summer, 2000 Saw Mike in Toronto and got a copy of floppy disks and the Weird Homes TV special on his tree house.

This site is a gift from me to you Mike for all the adventures and life lessons. If anyone wants to add pictures or stories, please email jono@the-wire.com.

Peace and love to all ~ Jono

"I believe that mike's friends should give their full accounts of their friendship with mike so that the full picture emerges."