Granada, in the Heart of Spain

Blablacar is a ridesharing community/website/app where drivers can sell passage in their extra carseats – kind of a more casual, long-distance version of Uber, but more conversational. I’d heard about it a few times in other countries where hitchhiking was working so well that I wasn’t interested in an alternative, but in Spain Blablacar really was the best way to get around.

We left Valencia in pairs, Drew and I in one Blablacar and Andrew and Madison in another. We rode with Ramon, a middle-aged Valencian who spoke solid English and was all smiles all the time. He treated us to a little rest-stop Burger King and left us near the center of Granada. Andrew and Madison left Valencia an hour later, but their driver, an off-duty police officer, drove blazingly fast and dropped them off closer, so they arrived at our AirBnB first.

Ramon called the neighborhood we were staying in, Albaicín, the “Gypsy neighborhood.” It was an old part of town, on top of a hill, all steep and twisty roads too narrow for cars. Some streets gave a broad, beautiful view of the white, sunlit city and the plains beyond. Others were tight and claustrophobic, opening into festive plazas where restaurants’ outdoor seatings spilled into each other cordially.

I don’t know a lot about Spanish history, but I learned some there; Granada has a way of piquing the interest. Over the centuries, Spain’s rulers have included the ancient Iberians, the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes, the Moors, and the Spanish Christian society that launched Christopher Columbus (whose permission was granted in Granada), with little groups like Gypsies thrown in to keep it confusing. The resulting tapestry of cultural remnants feels distinct from anyplace else in Europe. On our first evening there, the main thing we did was get drinks and tapas (in Granada, a round of drinks always comes with free food, to our delight). On the next day we explored. In the city center, past the cathedral, there’s a street market that evokes the colorful chaos of the Moroccan medinas we would see later. Most of wares felt like the kind of stuff I remember from Tex-Mex Tijuana, cheap leather and jewelry and souvenir trinkets, nothing too unique-looking, but it was cool nonetheless.

I broke off from the group for a bit to see if I could do any busking; the streets around the market were studded with performers, something I hadn’t seen yet in Spain – Barcelona and Valencia have some tight restrictions on busking, and I heard enough horror stories about instrument confiscation by police that I didn’t take any chances. But Granada was much more relaxed. I wandered a bit and tried a few spots, then wandered off to try to find a haircut. I was long overdue, and I was really feeling it in the heat. But to my dismay, every barbershop I found on my map was closed for the summer holiday. How the country functions at all is beyond me.

Where Barcelona is Catalan but feels more global, and Valencia reads like a scaled-back version of the same, Granada feels deeply, purely Spanish (in all its aforementioned complexity), less muddled by tourism and the cultural melting down that accompanies it. We had paella and sangria for lunch and explored Alhambra, an old, sprawling fortress/palace/castle complex that’s grown and survived through Roman, Moorish, and Christian use. It’s at the top of a steep hill, and by the time we got up there, we were dusty and pooped. Furthermore, we didn’t feel like paying, and it seemed like another of those things where we would have had to book our entry in advance anyway, so we just explored where we could. We came back down on a road that curved around the back wall of Alhambra, and Andrew and Madison had an idea. There was a path that branched off to the side, up a hill, blocked off by an old wooden door, locked. A wall about the height of the door extended from the door, blocking the path until it swerved uphill. They climbed up this wall to see if it went anywhere. I took a power nap on a thick cement bit that served as a railing but also a bench. After a while, Drew hopped up after them and I went off to take another stab at finding a barber.

Andrew and Madison found me busking near the market later. They had found a back way into a garden area and from there had gotten into part of the Alhambra, a part that you’d have to pay for normally, without getting caught. Drew never found them, but we managed to all find each other again by evening.

We had dinner in several rounds, having drinks and tapas various different plazas around Albaicín. At our third stop, a flamenco band was busking for the crowd. There were two main singer/dancers, clapping and stamping and whirling as flamenco dancers do, all powerful, aggressive movements and fierce looks. Behind them I only remember guitar and cajon and 3/4 timed handclaps, and spontaneous shouts, but there were some other instruments too. The guitar player wore a ratty suit and a scruffy beard, and a woman with blonde dreadlocks was singing in a wailing, feral cry, as intense and intimidating as the faces and steps of the dancers. We were enthralled. I could see why I hadn’t made a lot of money busking there – they were getting free shows like this every night. We all wanted to tell them how impressed we were, but we were too scared. Their performance was so intense, so confrontational, it was hard to see them as anything but.

The next day we took another Blablacar to Seville,all together. Our driver was a young guy in a Superman shirt who loved American movies. We were all laughing with bewildered wonderment when he showed us his favorite road trip soundtrack, a compilation CD of American TV show theme songs. We stayed in the AirBnB flat of an Englishman who, as he was giving us our keys, told us that his wife had just given birth in the last few hours, and he had to go rush back to the hospital. What a guy. We had a nice Spanish dinner, and then Drew wandered a bit while I busked in the restaurant area and Andrew and Madison went to see a football game, Seville against Barcelona. Seeing a good European football match was a box Madison had been determined to check off.

Seville seemed neat, but it fell victim to an awkward spot in our timing. Granada had given us the main thing we’d missed in Barcelona and Valencia, with all their big beach city thrills – a feeling of being immersed in another culture. Really, they’re great, and I was excited to swing through them again with Jane later in the month, but in many ways they feel more generally Mediterranean than Spanish. Granada is unmistakably Spanish, and it would leave a strong impression on anyone. Seville, sandwiched between that experienced and our tour of Morocco, was just a pleasant little placeholder. I couldn’t even find a barber, so I’ll let someone else make a case for it. Go to Granada!

Madison took this picture. That’s Alhambra.

Two Ways to Hitchhike to Valencia

The loose plan Andrew and company brought to Spain was to start in Barcelona, move south down the coast towards the southern tip of Spain, take a ferry into Morocco, explore there for a bit, then cross back into Spain and spend the last few days in Portugal before flying home from Madrid. My own plan was to meet Jane, the wee bonnie lass from Glasgow, in Valencia after two weeks of travelling with Andrew and the dudes. Valencia is the next major city on the southward journey from Barcelona, so it was our next destination.

We’d talked about hitchhiking, how I’d been doing it pretty successfully, and, although it was supposedly more challenging in Spain than in most European countries, the guys were willing to give it a try. The three to four hour drive from Barcelona to Valencia would be a good distance to try it out. So we left our AirBnB accommodation and followed my route to one of Hitchwiki’s recommended hitchhiking spots. This meant taking a bus to a train to another train, a lengthy process that was made lengthier by my following the wrong set of directions at first, and then walking a mile on a hot, dusty road (after climbing around on an overgrown, scrap-metal-strewn roadside path for a bit due to unclear instructions), finally ending up at a gas station rest area on the side of the highway bypass at 2:00 in the afternoon – a couple hours later than I would have liked.

Weary and sweaty and hungry and thirsty and starting to regret this whole thing, we took a few minutes to regroup. There were two other hitchhikers who had taken the same train as us, young dudes from I can’t remember which Baltic state. Since I hadn’t yet replaced my marker since losing it in England (the craft supply store I checked in Spain was closed for its owner’s summer holiday), we were grateful to borrow theirs, and made two Valencia signs on scrap cardboard outside the gas station.

Leaving the Baltic dudes to hitchhike from the rest stop exit, Drew and I started thumbing from beside the restaurant/convenience store while Andrew and Madison went inside to get food. Finding a driver who would take all four of us together wouldn’t have been impossible, but was so unlikely that it would have been absurd to count on it. Expecting to wait maybe an hour, it was fun to be offered a ride in hardly 20 minutes. We were taken to Tarragona, a town almost an hour south of Barcelona, by a young Catalan couple escaping the Barcelona’s tourist-crammed beaches for quieter ones. They were very friendly and informative, and their English was pretty good. I asked them to drop us off at a rest stop just north of Tarragona. This one was much the same as the last, except now we weren’t competing with other hitchhikers. We walked to the rest area exit and held up our signs, and were picked up in mere seconds by the first truck that passed us by.

 

Our second driver of the day was a pro trucker who had been on the road for several days and was finally coming home to his family in Valencia. Yep, he was taking us all the way there. He spoke almost no English, but Drew’s command of basic Spanish was enough that we could communicate most ideas we tried to share, given enough time and the right tools – our driver using Google Translate on his phone for a word we were struggling with, me sometimes pitching in with a word I recognized from high school Latin. He told us about places to see and things to eat in Valencia, and pointed out ancient watchtowers on distant hills – this area of Spain used to use a Gondor-esque watchtower network to protect the coast from Moorish invasion, when it wasn’t a Moorish territory. At least, I think that’s what he was saying.

It was a beautiful and very amiable drive. He took us to a gas station on the far side of Valencia. From there, Drew and I walked a mile or two, past little industrial areas and strange rickety houses and tiny farms, then caught a bus, meeting our AirBnB host at the arranged time. We were staying in a spacious, air-conditioned apartment, with four beds and two bathrooms and a fully equipped kitchen. It was early evening, and we had arrived with time to spare, an ideal day of hitchhiking. Unfortunately, Andrew and Madison did not have Drew’s beginner’s luck.

They didn’t see Drew and me catch our quick ride out of Barcelona, but we kept them updated via text. When we got our second lift, they were still at the first place. I told them what an easy time we’d had at the second rest area and gave them its location on the map. After maybe two or three hours of waiting (practically American wait times!) they finally got a ride out. You’ll have to ask one of them if you want the full story of their first ride. It involved an immigrant (Moroccan maybe?), thicker language barriers than ever, a car on the brink of catastrophic breakdown, another hitchhiker, and lots of confusion.

Andrew, if you’d like to guest-post about this little adventure, be my guest.

They ended up at the very same place we’d hitched from, on the outskirts of Tarragona. But the first truck that passed them did not pick them up. Neither did any other vehicle that night. They got some rude gestures and honks, but no hospitality. As the evening grew late, they got discouraged, then desperate, then gave up, electing to spend a few Euros for a guarantee than rather than hold onto the dwindling hope of a ride offer. They walked miles along a meandering, barely-there Google Maps walking route only to miss the bus they’d meant to catch and have to wait for hours.

In Valencia, Drew and I went shopping for groceries, intending to feed Andrew and Madison some home-cooked dinner when they arrived, then played games and had nice conversation when we learned that they wouldn’t come in until past midnight. We had just followed through on a half-joking challenge made in Barcelona to see who could name more of the original 151 Pokemon from memory when Andrew and Madison finally arrived, exhausted and drunk as lords. Given the extreme disparity between our luck and theirs, I would have understood if they’d been depressed or bitter, but, in a testament to their resilience and will to enjoy this trip, they had discovered a rich mine of humor in the absurdity of the day’s events. They were just ready to laugh it off, sleep hard, and live on.

We hitched at the same time, from the same places, with the same general looks and attitudes. There’s really no accounting for our success and their failure except by luck. This is the only time I’ve had two test runs of the same hitching scenario, and with such different results, it’s easy to imagine that all of the strategy and rationale I’ve developed from 150 hitchhikes has just been a futile attempt to apply logic to chaos. Maybe every single time I’ve stood with my thumb out, the results could have varied so wildly with just the slightest shift of luck.

As for the future, the group reached a consensus quickly: though hitchhiking had its merits, with their limited time here and the difficulty of hitching in Spain, it just wasn’t worth the trouble this time.

We spent the next two days in Valencia, longer than we’d initially planned, adding some extra time to recuperate from Madison and Andrew’s hitching day from hell. Valencia is a lot like Barcelona, but smaller, more compact, and a bit less global. There’s a pretty upbeat downtown area with some older architecture and cool stuff, and the beaches are perfect without being overwhelming. A river that used to run through the center of the city has long since been diverted, and the riverbed has been reformed into a park that stretches across the city center towards the ocean; it was there that we ran into Natasha, the Calvin College graduate with whom I Couchsurfed in Vancouver last year. I had no idea she was traveling, and happening upon her in a park in Valencia was a disorienting surprise, one of those things whose massive unlikeliness rocks your innate sense of probability to its core.

We talked about maybe hanging out as a group in the evening, but Natasha’s travel schedule didn’t end up having space for it. Instead we hung out with a group of Italian travelers we’d met over breakfast at our AirBnB in Barcelona. They were in Valencia now, and one of us must have grabbed a phone number. We met Marcello, the twin sisters Marianna and Susanna, and Simona. They were great fun to talk to. Spanish was neither their first nor second language, and English was even further down the list, but after the guys made a valiant effort to chat with them in Spanish, the conversation settled into simple English, with Marcello and Simona taking the lead and helping Marianna and Susanna along when their English couldn’t cut it. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about only knowing English and making everyone else speak it, and this was one of those times. But we had fun. Even with a limited vocabulary, a bunch of Americans and Italians have a lot to talk about. After the usual topics of travel, cultural differences and stereotypes, and American politics were thoroughly explored, we found other surprising little islands of common ground, like a love for The Simpsons, or a protracted conversation about what it’s like to study to be a judge in Italy.

We spent our third night in Valencia in a new AirBnB closer to the beach, where we met a couple French art students and some German travellers. Later the French travellers met us at the beach, where we were spending most of our afternoon, and when our Italian friends also joined the circle, we started feeling really cool. It’s fun to bring people together, and it felt nice for our little egos that people actually wanted to hang out with us. Someone asked me to play the banjo, and a few random young passersby joined the group too. I don’t remember any of their names or stories, but they were nice. Of all the beaches I’ve travelled to, particularly on this trip, this was the first one that seemed so friendly, so open, in the way that a good British pub is more open than the average American bar. People aren’t expected to stick to their friends as much. Or maybe it was just the banjo and our awkwardly friendly American charisma.

Valencia itself may not have made a strong impression on me, but I remember those days warmly. Something about Valencia lent itself to making connections – travellers meeting travellers, old pals appearing out of nowhere, communal beach songs. I have a feeling we could have found connections like those in any Spanish city if we’d just known how to look for them. Maybe this was the city where we learned how.

Barcelona Con Amigos

Andrew and I have had a long and rich friendship. We met just as we were beginning college, during that explosive first weekend where every new person in the cafeteria could be your next best friend. We bonded quickly over our love of indie music; cohosting a radio show together for four years was pretty much inevitable. Our friendship has waxed and waned through changing living situations and friend groups, different attitudes and ideologies, eventually landing on opposite sides of the country as adults. Last year I visited him in Seattle, while we were both in different stages of grieving our own respective losses, and our often dormant friendship was a surprisingly strong comfort for us both. We’ve been in relatively frequent contact since then, even going as far as adorably mailing each other personalized mix CDs last spring. I’ve kept the songs on his in constant rotation throughout my travels.

Andrew and Drew and Madison, two friends of his from his adolescence in Michigan, had been planning a trip to Spain for a while before he casually invited me to join them. With my itinerary being as fluid as ever, I decided to make it happen, letting the loose days and destinations fall into place around this locked event. Andrew, Drew, and Madison arrived in Madrid and made their way to Barcelona as I was hitchhiking across southern France. And so when I arrived at the hostel they’d booked for their first couple nights in Barcelona, Andrew was there in the lobby to greet me.

My bed claimed and my stuff stowed, we made the short walk to the beach, talking about everything , stopping at a corner store for Andrew to pick up a new absurdly cheap box of Don Simon wine. He told me about their Blablacar driver from Madrid to Barcelona, a Frenchman named Sinclair, whose critique of America was encapsulated in his three-word summary of the American burger, and every specific ingredient therein: “Too much pleasure.” The beach was a twenty-minute walk away, and as we arrived on the sands, Andrew excitedly told me he had another amazing story, and proceeded to start telling me again about the French Blablacar driver. The boy was in good spirits.

Drew and Madison awaited us at the beach. I spent some time with Drew on my Seattle visit last year, although we’d crossed paths years earlier when he joined us for a concert in Chicago. Drew is a polarizing figure, and he openly (proudly) admits it: a bizarre mixture of conflicting ideas and deeply rooted habits; a smooth-talking, introverted, picky-eating, easygoing, argumentative, flirtatious, photo-avoiding, gift-shopping, teetotaling, goofy dude who is a delight to travel with, especially when he let me finish most of his meals. Andrew and Drew have a special relationship, very compatible in a few ways and starkly contrasting in others, but deeply appreciative of one another.

I had never met Madison, but he was a welcome foil to the other two. Drew and Andrew are pretty strong personalities, intense, sharply funny piles of adjectives and opinions, with big dumb hearts underneath. Madison is more soft-spoken but less self-conscious, and he’s more emotionally steady and level-headed than the rest of us put together. When the rest of us would butt heads on little decisions, he’d be the tiebreaker, and when we’d flounder helplessly, he would step in and be decisive. If things were ever tense, he in the group, he would stay neutral and warm. And thanks to his photography skills, there are lots of photos floating around from this part of the trip where I look really cool.

Barcelona is a cool city. It’s Spanish, but very global, very much its own thing. The cool, old parts of the city are vast, and winding, narrow streets and alleys reveal all kinds of cool shops and bars and restaurants. Further from the beach, the streets get wider, with lush, grassy medians and shade trees, a sunny, spacious kind of urbanity.

In Spain, especially in the summer, people operate on a different schedule than most of the western world. Everything is closed in the afternoon as the sweltering heat drives people indoors, and as a result, the progression from dinnertime to nightlife is shifted forward a few hours. We knew the appropriate way to travel in Spain was to embrace this and become night owls, but we had trouble making it happen in Barcelona. We often found ourselves at the right destinations but at the wrong times, or if the time was right, we were too tired or hungry or hot to take advantage of it. So while we had a lot of nice moments in Barcelona, I had a frequent sense of being out of sync with the city, on the cusp of really enjoying it but not quite clicking into place.

We found out the hard way that a lot of the tourist attractions had to be booked in advance to keep the crowds manageable; our attempts on one day to visit La Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum both dead-ends in this way. But we planned a little better the next day, getting all our ducks in a row to visit Montserrat in the afternoon and La Sagrada Familia after. We took a train out of the city to the foot of the mountain, then a funicular to the compound near the top of it, which houses the 1000-year-old abbey and accompanying museum, as well as a grocery store and restaurant and hotel.

It’s always nice being up in the mountains. The view was bright and dusty and vast. We had snacks among milling tourists before hushing our voices to enter the abbey itself, whose chapel was stunning. In the dim light, bejeweled statues and artwork glowed golden and mysterious. The room was like a small cathedral, vaulted and imposing, every wall housing a little prayer nook stuffed with ornate artwork. We wandered a bit in silence.

From outside the cathedral you can see where someone has erected a cross on the horizon, on a jutting cliff across the face of the mountain. We estimated the distance and hiked it, first passing a transcendently serene cat and a cello busker, then a long trail of trees interspersed with statues of saints and the occasional abandoned Spanish building. The view from the cross was no disappointment.

A sweltering, packed train took us back to Barcelona, where we made our appointment to visit La Sagrada Familia. It’s not the only beautiful cathedral in Barcelona, but it’s a uniquely incredible one. I don’t know a ton about architect Antoni Gaudí – I hadn’t even heard of him until a driver in Italy told me to check out his stuff in Barcelona – but  we’d walked past a few of his buildings in the city, s0 we knew that this cathedral, the insanely grandiose, unfinished culmination of his life’s work, was something special. I’ve seen a handful of cathedrals now, and La Sagrada Familia redefines towering. Notre Dame has got nothing on it; the thing is insanely big, and packed with so much detail and color and texture that it’s overwhelming from any outside angle. But the inside is completely different.

If the outside of the cathedral is all about shape, the inside is all about light. I’ve seen nothing like it. An enormous cavern of clean lines and soft, pale stone plays canvas for bright beams of light in every color, rainbow shadows of sun through stained glass. One side hosts soothing aquatic colors that slip gently across the walls as time passes, while the wall opposite looks like fire pouring forth from heaven. The focal point of the cathedral is a statue of Jesus crucified, suspended in the vacuum above, wreathed in a glowing golden halo. From the far side of the cathedral, looking above the cross, a golden haze glows, getting somehow brighter and less coherent the higher you look. Photos struggled to capture the magic; it didn’t look real.

Behind the altar there’s an area for prayer and contemplation, where blue and yellow lights dance hover across walls and organ pipes. You have to promise the attendant that you won’t talk. It’s a good place to sit and think awhile.

The South of France and the Worst Hostel

I don’t have much to say about Nice; I had other places to be. I woke up in the morning and took a train out of town, following Hitchwiki’s advice and making a cardboard sign with “Cannes” on it and finding a lift very easily – a welcome change from northern Italy. The couple who picked me up dropped me off at a highway toll station near Cannes, saying it was a good spot to get a further lift. I knew it was illegal to hitch from those in France, but Hitchwiki said they were pretty lax about it. Well, maybe not in 2016. Police pulled up to me pretty quickly, but unlike the Italian ones, they offered to take me to the next rest area so I could hitch from there. Concerned elders, you’ll be pleased to know that I haven’t had any run-ins with police while hitchhiking since.

A trucker at the next rest area saw my “Barca” sign and picked me up after a short wait. He was going to Aix-en-Provence, and his English was almost nonexistent, but the fundamental details of our trip were sorted out pretty easy. He called himself Mumu. While we drove he called multiple dudes on his speaker phone and launched into explosively intense conversations, both parties speaking rapid-fire Arabic on top of each other, Mumu letting go of the wheel to gesticulate sharply with both hands. These outbursts would end abruptly in under a minute, and Mumu would peacefully drive on as if nothing had happened.

Mumu left me at a rest stop just before Aix-En-Provence, and an older dude picked me up shortly after. His name was Fred, from Toulouse, and his English was fluent. Sète was his destination, a coastal town halfway to the Spanish border, but he was going to leave the main road shortly after Nimes, where my route along southern France would bend south. We agreed that would be the place to drop me off.

I was in Nimes for a couple hours. After waiting unsuccessfully at a peage on the southeastern end of town, I concluded that none of that road’s traffic was going south and walked across Nimes to another outbound toll station. This one was more successful, and I got a lift into Montpelier, about 75 miles from the Spanish border. 

Montpelier is a cool little town with a very old center, all twisting, narrow alleys and cool, lively plazas. It is also, like Nice, a bit of a rough place. Being a warm southern town, it has its fancy streets with vacationers and classy restaurants,  but it also had loads of refugees and homeless hunched over benches and slumped in dark corners. About half of the streets stank of pee.
The only hostel in town had some of the most abysmal online ratings I’d ever seen, but I wasn’t able to lock in an AirBnB booking or Couchsurfing host in time, so I took the gamble. The bad reviews were mostly about the security and vibe of the place, saying that there was nothing stopping a random person from just walking in and stealing stuff. They also said there were no toilet seats. But it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Well, Auberge de Jeunesse HI Montpellier is indeed a terrible place. They use one of those systems where all guests have to leave their room keys with the attendant upon leaving the building, but there doesn’t seem to be any scrutiny towards “returning guests” who ask for those keys. Oh, also, the rooms’ doors didn’t lock or even shut automatically, so if one of the ten people in a room was lax on the lock thing, everyone’s stuff was at risk.When I checked in, they were already out of keys for my room, which should have been impossible unless someone had a key who wasn’t supposed to. The host seemed perplexed, like this had never happened before and could never be figured out. I bike-locked my bag to my bed (in a 10-bed room with one electrical outlet) and hoped for the best, taking my banjo (with my passport in the case) out with me for the evening.

I busked a little bit but didn’t make much – outside of the busy main square, where a few amplified buskers seemed to be doing okay, there wasn’t much interest. An abundance of beggars can have that effect. I spent most of my evening just wandering around. I went to bed before too late, pleased to see nothing had been stolen.

A few hours later, people in my room started yelling at each other in French, walking up me and surely everyone else in the building. From what I could piece together, this young dude was sleeping in a big older guy’s bed, and when the older guy showed up, he tried to stand his ground. By the time I was aware of what was going on, the older guy was still shouting and the young dude was crying and moaning, then dramatically throwing himself onto the floor and sobbing. He laid there for a while before the host came in and made him leave. My theory is that he never paid to stay there and just walked in and asked for a room key, pretending to have already paid. But his intensely emotional response to the whole situation was really weird.

At about 6:30 I blearily stirred awake as two dudes came into the room who hadn’t been sleeping there. I’d seen them the night before – two black teens, maybe 14, both wearing all white. One of them had stood in front of me while I was playing banjo and did a little mocking air-banjo pantomime before getting bored and leaving. They were looking around the room at people’s stuff. I didn’t see if they touched anything, but when they noticed that I was awake and watching them, they turned around and zipped out of the room in a hurry. If that’s not guilty behavior, I don’t know what is.

The next morning, at breakfast, a meek young Frenchman was asking if anyone had seen his phone.

Oh, and there really were no toilet seats on any of the toilets. Just pee splatters.

The next morning I took a tram to a peage and hitched with a middle-aged Frenchwoman to Béziers, the next town over. She runs one of those little face-paint booths for beach tourists, setting up shop in a different town every day of the week. We hit pretty nasty traffic about halfway through, but she got me to a huge rest area just north of Béziers. Apparently it was the big travel weekend for the area, and traffic was bumper to bumper from Béziers almost all the way to Barcelona, turning a three-hour drive into more like six.

At the rest area, I spoke with two young Dutchmen who were flying hitching signs on the main road. They were also aiming for Barcelona, and had hitched from the Netherlands – not much different from my own route, though I’m sure they were more direct. Traffic was crawling by like a string-shotted Slowpoke, giving cars plenty of time to see them, but they’d been trying for two hours to get a lift with no luck. The drivers must have all been too grumpy. I went immediately to plan B, playing banjo in front of the gas station store/restaurant with my Barca sign, where dozens of people were milling about, avoiding their inevitable return to the congested highway.

I made a few Euros, impressed some motorbikers, and was eventually offered a ride by a friendly Parisian couple who were going all the way to Malaga, in southern Spain. In the car we listened to Muse and the Jackson Five and talked – the wife had studied English – and they were so smiley and accommodating, offering me water and chocolate and even driving a little bit out of their way to take me closer to the hostel where Andrew and Madison and Drew were staying. And so, after almost two weeks of hitchhiking and hosteling through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, getting stuck and camping in Italy, and staying in the stupidest hostel ever in Montpelier, the most strenuous part of my trip was over. I was in Spain with my friends.

Over The Alps and Stuck in Italy

Lucerne is beautiful, but Switzerland is pricey, so I didn’t stay long. I busked downtown in a shopping area for half an hour before a security guy told me no buskers were allowed until 5:00, but I had made 19 Swiss Francs, which was just enough for a sandwich and some fries before heading out to the highway. The road south started on the other end of town, but that was only about a mile away, so I walked.

The first Hitchwiki-approved spot was a bus-stop pullover near the highway entrance. Two girls were standing at the curb holding signs with Italian town names, thrusting them out towards the windows of slow-moving traffic. They had hitchhiked from Berlin, heading to Italy for a music festival. They’d been looking for rides there for over an hour. I wished them luck and walked on to find another spot. It was the right choice. The on-ramp wasn’t far, with a nice, wide shoulder beside slow-moving traffic drawing from both sides of Lucerne. I got a lift in ten minutes. The driver was only going a few towns south, and the place where he dropped me off had almost no traffic, but I got another lift in just a few minutes.

I was really in the mountains now. The main highways in this part of Switzerland burrow directly under the Alps rather than wind their way across them. A long tunnel spat us out at my driver’s destination, a small town called Flüelen. The town lies on the southern shore of a long lake, sharing space with it in a deep valley that stretches south between two craggy mountain ranges, a tunneled highway rushing out of the base of each. I stood for half an hour with little success at a junction where both highways meet and turn south. Finally a police car pulled over, and two officers with excellent English told me that I couldn’t stand where I was standing. Slip roads and ramps are okay in Switzerland, same as most European countries and American states, but not the highway shoulder itself. He told me I had to pay a fine – something like 80 or 100 chf, more than my cash on hand, which was in Euros anyway. I asked if they took cards, and one of them rummaged around for a card reader in the back of the car. Then they let me off the hook, saying they’d forgotten to pack the reader that day, which was cool. But they insisted that I get off the highway.

I wanted to play it extra safe, so I avoided the highway ramps altogether. After lots of waiting, two short lifts, and a mile or two of walking, I arrived at a rest area back on the main road, and I didn’t wait long before a friendly Swiss guy picked me up. His name was something like Laurenz, and he was great. He’s a theater manager in northern Switzerland, and he was going to Locarno, a small town on the Swiss-Italian border, for a festival. He’d heard that the traffic in the tunnels to Italy was pretty bad, so we went over  instead, up twisting slopes and switchbacks, in thin air and low clouds and snowcapped peaks and silver alpine lakes. It was a longer drive, but a beautiful one. We took a break at the highest point of the drive so he could have a cigarette, and he offered to take my picture by the elevation sign. It was good to be able to get outside and feel it all.

He didn’t have any plans for the evening, so he took me a little farther, driving us over the border for some Italian pizza. We talked about Switzerland and politics and the mechanics of food photography and bladesmithing, and the pizza was delicious. We parted ways after dinner. There was a hostel a few miles south, along a long, narrow lake, Lago Maggiore. There was no highway here, only little resort towns and hotels along a populated but slow-moving road. I walked along it with my thumb out in the dimming dusk, mentally preparing myself for a night of camping. But I got a ride as I was passing through a town square after sundown, a car full of young Swiss college dudes going on a little Italian camping trip for the weekend. They were friendly and asked lots of questions in decent English, taking me 20 minutes past their campground to get me to Verbania, where the hostel was.

When I finally got to the hostel, I found it entirely walled off, locked gate, no signs, no way to contact the people inside. I checked their website on my phone – turns out, the hostel isn’t staffed 24/7. To get in at night, I would have to have already booked a room and told them when I’d be coming. I had goofed. But it was a beautiful night on a quiet lake town. I set off for a place to camp.

Walking along the lake in the direction I would travel the next morning, I noticed a dusty old rope hammock sitting out by the docks of a tourist boat rental place. It was decently lit but not extremely visible, the area quiet but not secluded. And I wouldn’t even have to set up my own hammock. The knotty little hammock wasn’t the most comfortable sleep I’d ever had, but the few passersby didn’t bother me, and I woke up feeling refreshed in the early dawn.

Hitchhiking in Italy is notoriously hard. Hitchwiki and the Hitchhiking subreddit are quick to mention Italy and Spain as the exceptions when they say Europe is great for hitchhiking, and experienced hitchhikers I’ve met have confirmed this. Whether it’s caused by the blistering summer heat, weariness with being the inevitable destination for everyone in Europe’s beach holidays, or the tension around terrorism and refugees crossing borders, Spain and Italy are just difficult places for a hitchhiker to catch a break.

I found this to be true eventually, but my first morning of hitching in Italy wasn’t so bad. I got a quick lift with an old guy who spoke no English and listened to ’80s power metal, leaving me at the entrance to the highway. There was no good place to stand, and the huge signs at the Italian highway on-ramps all say “NO AUTOSTOP,” which means no hitchhiking, but I got another ride pretty quickly from a young nurse on his way to work. He left me at a highway entrance south of Borgomanero, a little town west of Milan and north of Genoa, which I was aiming for – I figured once I got near the Mediterranean, there would be enough traffic going along the beach towns that I’d be able to get consistent lifts towards and across southern France. My third lift came quickly as well, an Italian dude in an old sports car with lots of racing paraphernalia in it. He spoke no English and drove super fast, hitting 200 kph at one point. He left me near Vercelli, on the side of the highway, which I knew was a big no-no, but I got a lift from there too, from an older gentleman who spoke some decent English. Unfortunately, he also insisted on dropping me off on the highway, rather than taking me into the town where he was going, Casale Monferrato. This wouldn’t have been a huge deal, but I wanted to avoid hitching where I knew it was illegal. But I didn’t push very hard, and the language barrier played a part, and there I was on the side of the road in the sun.

I must have tried hitching from that spot for a good hour before a police car finally pulled up. This was a bit different from the Swiss experience – the Italian police spoke no English, and while they were brusque, they didn’t try to intimidate me or anything. They filled out some forms, checking out my passport and asking me for information, which was painstakingly tedious, as lots of letters in English are pronounced exactly the same as different letters in Italian, I eventually realized – E in English was written as I in Italian, for example. Getting him to spell “Naperville” correctly with no common language proved impossible. They drove me to the next highway exit and told me in Italian not to hitchhike, and also that I didn’t really have to pay the bill that they were giving me if I didn’t want to. I don’t remember the exact combination of hardly-understood Italian and clumsy English they used to convey this, but I got a strong impression that the paperwork was all a formality, and they knew that actually following up on the bill would be a major drag for all parties.

So, for the second time in two days, I had found myself hitchhiking from the wrong spot, intercepted by police, and let off the hook. Trying to hitch from the highway again was asking for trouble, so I walked the three miles to Casale Monferrato instead. I was hot and thirsty and dusty and a little smelly by the time I got there, but after some street pizza and water and a long sit in the shade, I was ready. I walked across town to where cars leave to rejoin the highway, and I found another ride before long, standing right under the “NO AUTOSTOP” sign, which must have only applied to the road after the sign.

This time I was with some Italian bros heading to Varazze on holiday, a beach town west of Genoa. They took me all the way to the coast, where they left me by a bus station (by this point I was pretty sure I was saying “gas station” correctly in Italian, but oh well). Varazze was a cluttered, touristy little place full of hotels and bars and ice cream shops all strung out along the beach under the blistering August sun. I followed Google Maps towards the main highway, climbing steeply uphill across a mix of public and private property before realizing that the westbound highway was a tunnel at this point and would be for miles. I was stuck hitching on the local road. At least that was fully legal.

I walked with my thumb out for a sweaty hour before stopping at a bar to see if I could charge my phone, which was almost out of juice after two full days of use and a night of camping and hadn’t managed to get any power through my car adapter during my last two rides. That’s when I learned that my European E/F power adapter wasn’t compatible with Italian plugs. It was time to conserve power and get to France pronto.

Eventually I found what looked like a decent hitchhiking spot. In spite of the traffic all seeming very local, the spot was good – a bus stop at the edge of town where dense tourist accommodations gave way to more spread-out tourist accommodations, and cars had room to see me and pull over. I never found out if it was a good spot, but I got lucky in a different way. A girl a few years younger than me was there waiting for a friend to pick her up, and she asked me where I was heading. Once we got to talking about my trip, she quickly offered me a ride with her friend to Savona. Her friend came soon after, a girl who plays ukulele in an acoustic punk band, if I’m remembering right. They were both into the idea of hitchhiking and wanted to do it in America someday, so they were pretty encouraging. But my spirits were dampened by my car charger’s continual failure to charge my phone. When they dropped me off I started Googling around for solutions to the problem. When I told Jane what was going on with my phone, she did some worried research on her own, insisting that I write her number down on paper in case I needed to reach someone in an emergency. Isn’t she great? She really is.

After using an extra banjo string to dig the dusty grime out of my phone’s USB input, I assessed my situation. I was now at a large rest area on the edge of Savona, where car and truck drivers get one last chance to park and refuel and snack before the main flow of traffic onto the highway separates into several lanes to go through a tollway. I stood by the tolls for maybe a second before a police car pulled alongside me and told me I had to hitch from the rest area. So I tried that for an hour, still in the afternoon heat, trying several different locations around the big rest area. While trying and failing to find a good spot, I watched another pair of hitchhikers try from the same place on the main road. They were also warned by police almost immediately. I decided to go with my gas-station backup plan, which I hadn’t had to do in a long time – playing banjo by the little convenience store.

The other hitchhikers were a French couple from Paris, in their 30s, headed for Florence. They’d done this before, and they knew Italy would be tough. We talked for a bit, and for a while the man hitched discreetly from the rest-area entrance while the woman listened to me play and talked. Eventually they were both standing with me in the shade by the convenience store. They hitch with signs, using a clear plastic sheet protector with a little stack of looseleaf sheets inside, each with a town name written in bold, thick pen – a nice little system for making lots of signs in advance and carrying them efficiently. I asked if I could borrow their “Nice” sign, and they happily offered it to me. They’d already passed through there, and they could make another easily.

I finally found a lift, and they wished me luck. My drivers were a cool Italian couple in sunglasses and fedoras. The wife was driving; she was a writer, and they were going to some sort of writers’ conference in Pietra Ligure. It wasn’t far, but it was in the right direction, and I figured it couldn’t get much worse for hitching than where I already was. I was wrong, but at least I was wrong in the right direction.

It was early evening, and I was at a smaller toll station, totally unmanned. Cars came through the toll steadily to get back onto the highway, but after two hours no one had stopped for me. I decided to try the highway again, deciding the risk of a fine was worth it to get out of there. Stepping carefully between decaying pavement and overgrown thickets between the long slip road’s guardrail and a steep downward slope, I eventually made it to the highway, where the slowly setting sun still provided enough light for cars to see me from a distance, with plenty of room to pull over. But the first car to pull over was some kind of highway safety patrol – not police, but official in some capacity. The driver spoke no English but told me I had to get off the highway. I somehow managed to convey to him that I was having a really rough day and a ride into town would be super nice, and he assented, taking me halfway to Borghetto Santo Spirito, to a roundabout that he said was good for autostop.

But it was getting late, so I decided to walk into town. I’d already camped the night before and hadn’t showered or charged my phone in a while – this was one of those nights where a hotel would be worth the money. I walked down a rough pavement road between tall grass and farmland, eventually emerging into a beach town packed with high-rising condos and tacky tourist bars. I walked down the main street for a while, stopping at every hotel I could find, but they were all fully booked. All of them. It was high tourist season, and towns like this just fill up. I reluctantly headed back to the edge of town to find someplace to camp. I spent the night a few feet away from the road into town, my hammock set up between two large trees whose trunks and shadows mostly kept me out of sight, blending into the underbrush and the tall grass beyond, although one car seemed to stop and stare a bit in the middle of the night before driving onward. Since I got set up before sundown this time, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep, but it wasn’t without stress.

I was up and hitching from that roundabout before 7 the next morning, giving that spot a good two hours before giving up. It was a really frustrating way to start the day. So many drivers made little apologetic gestures at my Nice sign before heading to the highway, but I knew from standing up at the tollbooth that most of those cars would drive off in the France-ward direction. It would have been foolish and selfish to feel entitled to a ride, but after most of Europe had been so accommodating to hitchhiking, finding more resistance (with steady traffic!) than I’d ever found in America was really disheartening.

I gave up on the roundabout and headed up to the tollbooth, cutting across a field and climbing up a slope instead of following the long curve of the slip road. I stood in the morning sun in the wide paved area after the toll, where cars could see me and had plenty of space to pull over, but to no avail. I finally gave up and decided to try the highway again, thinking at worst maybe I could get a police car to drive me to the next town so I could find a better (legal) spot, but I didn’t even make it 20 feet before a police car told me to head back. So I stood back at the tollbooth, growing even more frustrated, until I decided to try again, with the same results. This repeated three or four times until I finally got to the highway unnoticed. All the northwest Italian highway police must have known me by this point.

I had now been trying to get out of this town for a good five hours, not including my failed efforts the night before. I hadn’t slept well or showered in two days, I’d only eaten the lightest snacks, and I was running out of water – to get more of either I’d have to walk the mile or two back into Borghetto Santo Spirito, which would mean defeat. I was in bad shape, and I was pretty upset. The hardest bit was knowing that Jane, the wee Scottish lass who has come to care very much about me, was probably in a panic knowing that I was hitching with a (possibly permanently) dead phone and she hadn’t heard from me since the day before. I hated that she was worried for me and there was nothing I could do about it but try to get a ride.

In retrospect, the best course of action would have been to go back to town, eat and drink something, and try walking down the shore on that town’s main road. It probably would have yielded the same results if I’d started early enough, and it would have been less spirit-crushing. But without my phone I had no way of finding a map or figuring out the local bus or train situations – I didn’t even know if that road went anywhere – and I hadn’t found one English speaker since getting into that town the night before. So instead I dragged myself up to the highway. I was going to hitch a ride from someone, or I was gonna make the police help me.

For once the police didn’t descend on me immediately. I was starting to feel desperately thirsty. I split my time between standing in the sun where I was visible and the shade where I could cool off. I wasn’t dangerously thirsty yet, but I wasn’t feeling great. At least I wouldn’t have to feign looking desperate.

Of course it was a police car that pulled over after half an hour and not a potential driver. The two officers spoke no English, giving the usual Italian spiel about getting off the highway, “no autostop.” I told them I needed help, wishing I had thought to look up phrases like that in Italian when my phone had worked, and I kept asking them for a ride until they grudgingly called a taxi, waiting awkwardly with me until it came. It would have been cool if they’d just helped me out themselves, but at least I was getting out of there. The taxi driver also spoke no English, but to my deep relief, my car charger worked in his car, allowing me to get a little life back into my phone at least. I still have no idea why it hadn’t charged for the two days when I needed it the most, but at least I wouldn’t have to buy a new one.

The driver took me to the train station in the next major town, one that I could have walked to from Santo Spirito if I’d started at dawn, and waited while I withdrew money from an ATM to pay him, taking the price down by 5 Euros out of pity. The worst was over. I booked a train ticket to Nice, bought food and water, and had a surprisingly successful busk outside of the train station while killing time before my departure. I didn’t explore Nice at all, beyond washing my clothes at a laundromat and finding a cheap dinner. I booked a hostel and slept deeply, showered hard, and charged everything I had as much as it would charge.

Most of Europe has been great for hitchhiking, and with reservations, I’ll still recommend it to anyone. But I won’t be doing it in Italy again. I’ve got better ways to spend my time than standing out in the sun in Borghetto Santo Spirito for hours as cars ignore me. Is hitchhiking brave and cool and glamorous? Sometimes. Other times it’s just a drag.