Nearly 7 years on and this is still the thread that keeps on giving!
Long before we had our DC, we were staying near Fort William and stayed in a cheap hotel right on the north coast before taking a day-trip on the ferry to Orkney. It was only a small ferry with 5 or 6 vehicles on it. On the journey back across the firth, late in the evening, a young bloke approached us and started being very friendly and chatty all of a sudden. We reacted politely but just wanted to chill out before the long drive back.
He wouldn't let it lie, though, and he kept tapping us for useful info. In hindsight, we reckon he must have been down on the vehicle deck before departure sizing up his potential options. He'd looked a bit panicked at first - I think he'd thought it would be like a cross-channel ferry with hundreds of cars, coaches and lorries on it.
He was something of a self-styled troubadour and apparently didn't believe in the strictures of taking personal responsibility and making plans in advance when you can just find somebody else to put themselves out and provide for you every time.
He spun us a sob-story and we ended up giving him a lift back from the ferry port a long way south. Needless to say, he never for a moment thought to offer any contribution towards the petrol. Well, they're going that way anyway, aren't they.... Conveniently, I don't actually think he carried money with him.
It was pitch black on a mountainous road with many windy and/or coastal stretches, the wind was howling, so we were in no rush to floor it. He complained non-stop about how slowly we were going (maybe going down to 40 in some particularly dangerous places in a 60 limit) and kept saying to overtake the sensible 'slow' drivers ahead of us. At any rate, our car then was old and not overly powerful and we couldn't go that much faster with the extra weight of him, his massive rucksack and guitar in the back anyway. We also discovered that this back-seat driver 'experienced driving coach' didn't actually have a licence himself.
This drifter didn't really know where he wanted to go ultimately, and had very little idea of geography in general, but he suggested Perth, as he knew of some vague acquaintances friends who lived there and could pick him up. We asked where in Perth they lived and he managed to remember that it was Dunkeld. So not actually Perth, but 15 miles north of Perth. He didn't know exactly where in Dunkeld they were, so he suggested Perth would be easier for him them. Yes, he wanted us to drive near Dunkeld, past wherever their house was, and 15 miles further south to Perth, so that these great friends whose location he didn't actually know could be woken by the phone at about 3am and be told that they needed to drive an arbitrary 30-mile round trip to come and pick him up and take him back to theirs unannounced to provide him with accommodation. He didn't have a mobile phone with him - I don't think he even knew their number, so goodness knows how he was hoping to contact them anyway.
We had visions of us taking him to Perth, him realising that he couldn't contact them and so expecting us to drive him to Dunkeld, to have an endless drive around until sunrise before he struck lucky (not so much his 'friends') - maybe ask passers-by for impossible directions with the vaguest of information. Bearing in mind we had intended to branch off at Inverness to get back towards FW, but had lost our minds and thought we could have taken him all the way to Perth and got back 'home' via an enormous detour.
Once we truly understood how his mind worked, we saw the bullet and suddenly came to our senses to dodge it. We stopped off for petrol at the Nessie Garage in Inverness and told him we would have to find his own way from there as we were now going in a different direction. He protested quite a lot (without the phrase 'Thank you' ever being mentioned), but we 'helped' him out with his luggage and pitied the next unsuspecting trucker whom he managed to charm.