Nothing warms our hearts faster than hearing about users who have had joyful journeys on Ridejoy. But when two wonderful stories popped up right after one another, we had to turn on the AC to keep from overheating. With the launch of our new iPhone app, we thought it’d be cool to share some of the ways Ridejoy users are sharing rides and spreading joy with our service.

Enjoy!

Will gets a car (and boat) ride to New Orleans

Will Brown is a recent graduate of Claremont McKenna College and is traveling the country using collaborative consumption services like Airbnb, Grubwithus, and Ridejoy! He’s gone on 4 rideshares thus far, including one on Ridejoy where he posted a ride request from Atlanta to New Orleans. Here’s what happened next:

Within three hours I had an email from Ridejoy informing me that they had found a match with someone who was headed my direction. And that’s how I met Jessica. She’s 26 and was preparing to drive from her hometown of Greenville, SC to her current home of Austin, Texas and she was looking to split costs along the way. I was really impressed with Ridejoy for two reasons: its quick response time and that they matched me–who posted a ride from Atlanta to New Orleans–with Jessica whose starting and ending points were both different than my own.

Read more about the trip and how Will ends up on a sailboat and in his blog post: I’m On A Boat (and How I Got There With Ridejoy)

Alexandra coordinates a family trip with Ridejoy

Alexandra Samuel is the director of the Social + Interactive Media Center at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, the cofounder of a social media consultancy and blogs for publications like the Harvard Business Review. She’s also a mom raising two kids in Vancouver. When the family decided to roadtrip down to San Francisco this summer, they realized that it’d be nice to take the train home to save time. But then, how would the car make it back?

In the course of looking for one-way car rentals, I came across the phenomenon of “drive away” services, which could provide a driver to take our car back to Seattle while we took Amtrak. Cost: $500.

I decided to check for independent drive-away offers on Craigslist. Mixed in with the “ride wanted” and “ride offered” ads on Craigslist, I saw the occasional request for one-way drivers. And appended to one ad, I saw the intriguing line, “contact me on Ridejoy”.

That’s how I discovered Ridejoy, a ride-sharing site that matches drivers and riders in 790 cities across North America. Ridejoy cross-posts to Craigslist, so you still get the benefit of Craigslist’s rideshare board, but you get a much better search and matching tool.

…

Ridejoy has opened up a whole new horizon for family vacations. Now that we know it’s possible to do a one-way drive, I can see us organizing future vacations throughout Western Canada and the U.S., or even across the continent.

Learn more about how Alexandra coordinated her family vacation in her blog post: Take a One-Way Roadtrip with Ridejoy