Barcelona to Berlin Hitch - Day 2
Luxembourg/Charleroi/Verviers/Cologne/Dresden (Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany) - 8 June 2010
Luxembourg proved, after four hours of asking for rides, to be launching point strictly for Luxembourg city, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Eventually I realized we had to go north to Belgium and go east from there; the northeastern roadway was cut from the route.
Hitching Route:
A-B. Luxembourg to Charleroi by a Englishman who asked for our passports before we got into the car. His business has a policy against picking up hitchhikers but he made an exception. The conversation was a very lively one. It seems to be that way with the English, but that may be due to absence of a language barrier. He’s a Mormon conservative who lives in Milan. Handing us his card, he offered us a place to stay if we ever pass through his city. Raking up the connects…
B-C. We crossed a bridge - to head East instead of West - and got a ride by a Frenchman with horrid teeth; a contrast to his personable nature. He was supposed to drop us off a gas station on the freeway but he left us at one outside of it. This in hitchhiking gives an air of worry because most people at a gas station in the city aren’t even going onto the highway. Challenge accepted.
C-D. Luckily it wasn’t long to find someone. I managed to convince a gorgeous young Belgian girl to take two male hitchhikers down the highway for a few kilometers. To our misfortune however, her exit was before the gas station we needed to get to. The last two kilometers we walked. The universe and it’s perfect timing sent us an onslaught of pouring rain as we walked with 60 lbs on our backs. Our luck shifted in our favor as fast as it shifted out of our favor, and we were offered a 30km ride to a gas station just before Cologne. The man was yet another defined by business, and comes from a family of technicians. His name is Yahn, which apparently is the Belgian version of Sean; we have the same name in effect.
D-E. After asking four or five people I became slightly disenchanted because they were all going into Cologne. I feared this to be an ominous foreshadowing of every other car coming into the gas station. But, as I’ve experienced 95% of the time, it was not at all difficult to find a ride. In fact, this hitch was either the first or second largest I’ve ever received. It’s remarkable what one can do with body language… He was a Polish man who spoke no English but going all the way to Krakow. He dropped us off just before Dresden. On the way in I witnessed the most epic lightning storm I had ever experienced (it even had orange lightning). It’s as if the Dresden bombings had reoccurred that night.
Total distance hitched: 1,009 km.
Accumulated distance hitched: 5,840 km.
