Swiss National Day

You’re about to read about the continuing adventures of me trying to get to Barcelona to meet my friends. Well, in real-life time, that has long since happened – I’m typing this from a hostel in Valencia where I’m staying for a night before meeting Jane again to explore Spain and Italy together for a couple weeks. I parted ways with Andrew and Drew and Madison yesterday, after two weeks of traveling together around Spain and Morocco. Consequently, I’m about as far behind on writing as I’ve ever been. It’s fine, because the plan was always to let the writing happen in the space between the actual adventures, but the gaps already growing in my memory are frustrating.

I left Cologne by getting to the highway entrance by bus and hitching from a long, wide shoulder, where a delivery truck driver who spoke no English picked me up and took me to Bonn, the next town to the south. Unfortunately, he left me on the north side of town, so I either had to walk to the south side and hitch from there or find a slip road on my side and hope for the best. I found a wide-shouldered curve on the elevated on-ramp not far away and tried my luck. Despite the low traffic, a woman picked me up before too long. Her English was about as good as my Spanish (minimal and mostly secondhand), but she conveyed to me that she was going to Bad Godesberg, a small town along the Rhine just a few miles south, where she was scheduled to have a job interview. Let’s all hope she’s now gainfully employed there, because she was nice.

The road I  was dropped off on was sort of a local highway, and it was definitely going in the right direction, but there were no good places to stand. I was learning a valuable lesson about German hitchhiking: just do it on the Autobahn, where everyone is going a long distance. I reexamined my route and made a plan to get east to Autobahn 3, rather than walking futilely down little highway 9.

My map showed a little ferry going from Bad Godesberg to Königswinter, across the Rhine. I was pleased to discover that it only cost €1.50 and was boarding just as I arrived. From there I walked uphill to the road that connects Königswinter to Autobahn 3, and I quickly got a ride from a young dude named Magnus, who was driving home from work and bought me a McDouble from the McDonald’s drive-through he stopped at for lunch. German McDonald’s tastes like American McDonald’s. That’s really all there is to say.

Magnus left me at an extensive rest area where cars and trucks park in two long rows as their drivers refuel their cars and tummies. I stood near the end of the parking area, where the two lanes converge, to better my chances. Whatever I did worked. A small truck stopped for me, and its driver, a jolly German looking eerily like John Locke from Lost, told me in German that he was going towards Basel, Switzerland. His name was Torsten, or something like it, and he spoke no English, but he was a delight to travel with. He had a long trip ahead of him, and he would be going even further in the opposite direction the next day, and he seemed happy for the company, showing it in his enthusiasm to communicate with me. He was great at body language, waving at other trucks, giving a thumbs up when a car with a loud engine blasted by (very German), scowling at clouds overhead, flexing when he showed me a picture of his stocky dog, Arnold, and pointing pointedly at his foil-wrapped stack of cheese sandwiches until I’d eaten as much of them as he.

The radio played a mix of modern pop and older hits that were ostensibly American but must have only left a lasting impression in Europe. Torsten was an ace whistler and would whistle along and drum on his wheel to everything he liked, old and new, smiling at me during the good parts. And that’s how we communicated all afternoon, covering almost 400 kilometers: in the primal pre-language of grunts and faces and hand gestures. Of the personal facts one learns about another via small talk, I know almost nothing about Torsten, but I’m confident that he’s a kind-hearted, fun-loving guy whom I trust and will remember fondly.

He dropped me off at the last big service station before Switzerland. I waited again at the convergence of the many lanes of parking, and eventually I caught a ride with a Swiss couple from a small town near Lucerne, who agreed to take me to Basel, the first city in the country. That their English was excellent was a bit of a relief – they were very interested in what I was doing and had a lot of advice for me. As we waited for ages in such traffic oh the last mile before the Swiss border, they told me that the hostels in Switzerland are stupidly expensive. They also revealed that they’re involved in Couchsurfing, and although their place was a bit out of the way for further hitchhiking, they offered to find me someone to stay with in Lucerne, where they were headed to meet some friends for a Swiss National Day party – somehow I’d had the fortune to stumble into the country on their Independence Day.

After a pit stop to buy some beer to contribute, we arrived at a park by the lake that Lucerne hugs and found their friends.  There was a generous array of food and drink to choose from, and they were grilling up sausages as independent parties on either side of the lake lit off modest fireworks all night. They took turns meeting me and making conversation, finally asking if I’d like to play some banjo. It was lucky that I played a Sufjan Stevens song; at the end, one of them said, “Hey, I know that guy.” Yup, one of them had lived in the States for a while and worked on a couple documentaries with Sufjan, including the one about his brother that was announced when I was in college. I hadn’t heard about it since the trailer; turns out Sufjan had changed his mind and paid the crew not to release it. I forgot the name of the guy who knew Sufjan (it was a long day), but he said if I ever meet Sufjan and ask him about the tall Swiss guy, he’ll know who I’m talking about.

Because I didn’t drink much, and because Dominic’s van is the only automatic-transmission vehicle in all of Europe, I offered to drive him and his friends home, rather than letting everyone walk two miles while carrying an entire grill and picnic table. They were very responsible drunks. And so I drove for the first time since America, in the middle of the Swiss National Day night. It was pretty easy, although having a navigator helped. The road markings are extremely thorough in a way that I just found overwhelming.

I slept on a mattress on Dominic’s living room floor. He’s a photographer, and the walls of his flat were decked out in all kinds of aesthetically interesting stuff. He stayed up a little later, reading and smoking and listening to a cool ambient local radio station, while I slept hard, ready to continue Spainward in the morning.

 

Lucerne in the late morning