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.

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

Köln

It was time to cross another border. I had imposed on myself a deadline: to be in Barcelona on the sixth of August to join Andrew and his buds for a couple weeks. I had chosen a route: Rather than cutting diagonally across France, making a beeline for Spain, I was taking a more meandering route to see more countries. Germany was next.

The truck driver with whom I rode into Rotterdam the first time described the Netherlands as “The China of Europe” for its trading, seafaring culture over the centuries. As such, most everything is near the coast. To get into Germany, you have to go through some empty spaces. Ron, the driver who had lived in Michigan for a couple decades, dropped me off at a service station near Rotterdam. From there I was picked up by a young Dutch couple driving out to see the girl’s family. She was Dutch through and through, and her boyfriend was of Somali descent. His first and middle names Mohammed Ali, and he was well aware of how awesome that was.

They were going to a little village near the border; they dropped me off at a roundabout in hopes that I would be picked up by Germans who commute into the Netherlands for work. I quickly got another lift to the last town before the border, then thumbed for a little while in the rain beside a small gas station until I was picked up by Martin, a German. Martin’s English was great, confident enough to make jokes – he had lived in New York City in his earlier adult life, making money as a tour guide in the city, the kind that stands at the front of the bus telling the same anecdotes every day to endless waves of tourists.

Martin wished he could take me further, but he was only going into Kleve, the first big town over the border. I walked to the edge of town, taking Martin’s advice to try to get on a northern highway to get south, rather than hitching from this out-of-the-way town. I walked about an hour before realizing I’d missed a turn. After a little backtrack and more walking, I finally got a lift in a work van from a young Dutch girl named Evelyn, heading north to go home to the Netherlands after a day of work. Her English wasn’t confident, but it was enough for us to figure out a nice place for her to drop me off. 

From there I could either hitch from a slightly off-the-highway gas station, hoping to find southeast-bound travelers in the light traffic, or get right on the on-ramp or highway and hope for the best. The on-ramp was long and winding, but I found a spot to stand, and soon I was sharing the backseat of a young German couple with  their baby, driving a few towns down the Autobahn. They let me off just at the top of their exit ramp, and my next hitch was on a long straight stretch of highway, where the end of the on-ramp’s merging lane gave into a long, wide shoulder, plenty of room for a car to stop.

The car that pulled over next was occupied by a father who spoke no English and his two teenage sons. They were Kurdish immigrants. The sons seemed to understand me well enough but were too shy to say much. I know I made it into at least one of their Snapchat stories. The father understood that I wanted to go towards Oberhausen, a town at the northern end of the vast urban sprawl that connects Duisburg, Essen, Düsseldorf, and finally Cologne. We listened to some bumping Kurdish music, and I fell half asleep under the gentle weight of my backpack, crammed tightly on top of me in the confined backseat.

A heavy whump from the car’s undercarriage snapped me awake. The father pulled onto the shoulder and let the car roll to a stop. After a few seconds of deep breathing, he turned the key. Lights, but no engine. He and the older son got out of the car and looked around – under the hood, under the car, back on the road – and found nothing helpful. I sat tensely in the back until they seemed to give up and started making phone calls, then excused myself and wished them the best. Hopefully it got through. It was an awkward, strange situation, but I  had become the least of the father’s concerns, so it was a quick exchange.
In most developed countries it’s illegal to hitchhike from the highway itself, but there on the outskirts of Oberhausen, there wasn’t really anywhere to walk, and besides, my phone wasn’t connecting to any data in Germany, so I couldn’t pull up a map with enough detail to walk anywhere. I stood on a long, straight stretch of road as the evening sunlight slanted downwards. Eventually a man and his wife pulled over for me, seeming a bit grumpy that I was standing on his highigy but offering to take me to the train station. It was getting to be too late to hitch, and I didn’t want to spend the night in some overlooked town where there may not be hostels. I wanted to get to Cologne. 
I had never seen it spelled “Köln,” so it felt like a bit of a gamble buying a 15 Euro train ticket with that destination from the automatic ticket machine, but it worked out okay. I rode the train into Cologne and found some wifi with which to nail down the locations of a few hostels, and before the sun was down I was checked into a nice German hostel.
I was pretty wiped out, but after a quick lay-down I was ready to explore. After finding some cheap Turkish food, I took my banjo to the city center, where the most enormous cathedral I’d seen yet hulks darkly over the city. It’s a bulky, boxy, jutting thing of dark, dirty stone and narrow, tall windows, riding to two massive points high in the sky. Lit from below in the shadowy night, it looked like a zombie cathedral come back to life, roughly tattered and invincible. 

People mill about the wide plazas at the cathedral’s feet at all hours. Beyond them lies the center of the city, where dozens of bars and restaurants spill their denizens onto streets and outdoor tables. It was hard to find a place to perform, as the only streets with good foot traffic were wide and loud, and the narrow streets that were acoustically favorable were even louder. I found one perfect alley and made great money for a few songs before a frustrated mother poked her head out from an apartment window overhead and begged me to stop playing so her baby could sleep. I would not argue with that.

I made a friend, though, a guy who recognized the Tallest Man On Earth song I was playing as he walked by. He was Jack, a young Australian who makes a living traveling and busking around the world. True to my stereotype of his culture, his performance is looped, amplified acoustic guitar, embellished with cool fingerpicking and slides and tapped out beats. Tonight he was taking a night off, spending time with friends. We got to talking, and after quickly realizing how much we had in common, both in travel styles and musical tastes, he and the German girl with him  decided to accompany me for a bit and try to bolster my income by being really enthusiastic audience members. It worked a bit – there were no other places where my banjo resonated well without being drowned out, but Jack and his friend wrangled other passersby into sitting attentively in front of me to listen, and those people tipped me very generously. Thanks, Jack!

I decided to book a second night at the hostel. This could be my only stay in Germany, and I wasn’t going to get a good feel for it if I left immediately in the morning. But the next day I saw that most things in Germany seem to shut down on Sundays, so my options were pretty limited. There was also supposed to be a protest in the city center that day – pro-Erdogan Turks having a big rally in the wake of his recent, brutal power grab in the guise of a suppressed coup, and various anti-Erdogan, pro-human rights groups protesting the rally. It was expected to be violent; the hostel had a sign advising people to be careful. I kind of wanted to see it though. We don’t have many good protests in America. I would keep my distance, of course. I’m not a dummy.

I didn’t end up seeing or hearing the protests at all. I walked through the daylit downtown, checking out the cathedral again and walking by the river. Police were everywhere, standing tensely at attention at strategically placed metal barricades and walls of tightly parked police vans (German police are master parallel parkers). But I hadn’t heard anything about when the protest was going down, so I meandered to a nice street market by the river and performed  awhile in between craft and antique stands, making decent money and not annoying too many vendors. I was probably chewing down on a big ol’ sausage sandwich and drinking my Kolsch beer, or hiding from the intermittent rain, when the protest actually happened. It must not have been too bad, though. When I passed through the city center it was very quiet, and the police were packing up.

It’s a strange and very interesting time to be in Europe. In America, with the exception of 9/11, our terrorist attacks mostly take the form of mass shootings, and although xenophobic, isolationist rhetoric is getting a lot of airplay right now, our engagement with the droves of refugees coming from the Middle East has been minimal, and most people aren’t really affected. It’s all hypothetical. In Europe, only a few countries are really bearing the brunt of the refugee movements, some acting as holding pens for unplaced refugees without much of a plan for what to do with them, others accepting them and providing housing and money without much of a plan for how to help them fit in. Many understand that welcoming refugees is a moral imperative regardless of the consequences, but the grim reality of homegrown terrorism and violence among immigrant communities has left many exhausted and suspicious. It’s fine that I didn’t see the protest, an outburst of those very tensions, but I saw signs of that weary tension all over Cologne that day, and later France. The world is changing, and no one quite knows how. It’s a strange time to be in Europe. 

OG Holland

Amsterdam’s main red light district doesn’t bare its lewdness on every street. A few main north-south roads, mostly pedestrian-only, some bridging and straddling canals, others flanked by bike lanes, are packed with brightly lit bars, tiny hotels, cheap Italian restaurants, black and neon-pink clubs. At night people mill about and talk and laugh and shout on these streets just like any other city.

Then you turn a corner into one of the dozens of cross-streets and alleyways that lace across and connect the arteries, and you’re blindsided by gaudy sex shops, stores selling marijuana and its paraphanelia, coffeeshops where you can get drugs mixed in your drinks, and brothels, where prostitutes wearing as little as they can get away with stand behind glass doors under red neon lights, some trying to seduce the passersby with lips and words (one told me she loved me! How sweet.), others just looking bored. Some pedestrians pretend they aren’t there, as you would with a busker you don’t intend to tip. Others peek and giggle and ogle. Occasionally someone accepts an invitation and slides through a doorway, and a thick maroon curtain slides across the window. No longer open for business.

If you’re surprised to find me here, I can see why. I vastly prefer rock and roll over casual sex and drugs. But I knew I wanted to see the Netherlands, and it’s silly to go and not see Amsterdam, and it’s silly to go to Amsterdam and not see the most Amsterdammy part.

I got there from Belgium in two days of hitchhiking. The Belgians who took me into the Netherlands left me at a service station on a road connecting two other northbound roads. I wasn’t finding any lifts, so I walked a couple miles to a northbound junction. From there I got a quick lift from a gruff off-duty cop who just wanted me off the highway, then from a Morrocan man who had worked in the Netherlands for the last 50 years and was finally about to move back home, and then from John, a friendly old trucker with no teeth who took me all the way to Rotterdam, talking about Dutch history and food and culture along the way and laughing like Sinterklaas. It was a long day of travel, but a good one.

Much like my arrival in Dublin via trucker, I was dropped off at the docks and had to walk a bit to get to the city center. It was another hour and a half of walking with my pack, now under a steady drizzle. Google Maps took me to the edge of a wide river, and I realized there was a tunnel underneath it, which was pretty fun. You take a very steep, decades-old escalator with wooden paneling down beneath the river floor, then walk a long ways in an empty, boxy corridor, dimly lit and echoing. I’m 100% sure it was the inspiration for the Underground Tunnel in Pokemon Red and Blue. When I emerged, I was in central Rotterdam.

I’d heard good things about Rotterdam, but I felt too tired to busk or explore in earnest, so I checked into a neat  hostel and roamed the city center for snacks instead. My hostel was in an area called Cool District, and it was indeed cool. In the morning I got an Acai bowl at a cafe, which was composed very differently than what I had in San Diego, but was still delicious.

I made my way across streets and busy bike lanes (the Netherlands have mastered bicycle friendliness to an insane degree) to a service station to begin hitching, and Michael picked me up in his van. He’s a concert and festival promoter who works in The Hague and Rotterdam. We talked about Belgium’s lack of identity, the Dutch’s impact on the world (especially in slavery), and my prospects as a busker in Amsterdam. He recommended the Red Light District for busking; it really is the center of Amsterdam’s nightlife, not just prostitution.

From a highway junction outside of The Hague, I quickly got a lift from Dimiter, a travelling Bulgarian-born Australian who’s going around Europe paragliding and doing stuff like that. It was his second time picking up a hitchhiker, and only the first time he’s done it and not been creeped out, but we had plenty to talk about, like traveling and his various hobbies (he has good stories) and fractals and the original XCOM game, which he grew up with. We arrived in Amsterdam before his friends were ready to meet him, so he parked his car and we walked together into the city center, talking and taking it in. Our route crossed canals and quaint, Dutch-style brick buildings. When we stumbled onto a perfectly buskable farmer’s market, I set up to perform after buying a little smoothie for myself. Dimiter listened for a bit, took some pictures, and headed off into the city.

It was a great busk, with heavy traffic and little competition. Even with the language barrier, I was able to play a few of the smoothie vendor’s shouted requests – Sweet Home Alabama, Man of Constant Sorrow – which he rewarded with more smoothies. I ended up having five of them, but they were small, so I didn’t regret it later, not really. I met a fashion designer with a black-and-white afro and a big dude following her around carrying her stuff, who wanted me to play at a fashion designer party she was throwing later in August, but I would be long gone. I met a little Californian family who appreciated my Sufjan Stevens cover, too. When the market started closing down, I was feeling pretty great.

I stayed for two nights in Amsterdam, staying first at a mediocre hostel and then a pretty bad one, meeting a few people and eating decent snacks. The first night’s busk went very well, and the second’s started well until police told me that I couldn’t play after dark, and that I would need a permit to play in the city center anyway. They were nice about it. But that meant it was pretty much bedtime. 

I’m glad Amsterdam exists – I’ve got no moral conviction that there shouldn’t be one city in Europe where people go to get extra debauched. And it’s a friendly, small, pleasant city in a lot of ways, but the elements that compose its reputation just aren’t things I care much about.

My first lift the next day was with a Dutch guy named Ron. Ron lived in Mount Pleasant, Michigan for 25 years before settling back in Amsterdam with his Thai husband. Back then he had a boat in Saugatuck that he would sail to Chicago from time to time. Now he keeps his boat in Rotterdam and sails along the Dutch coast on weekends – today he was sailing to Zeeland, the westernmost province of the Netherlands. I asked him about Holland, Michigan, where I went to college. He sighed, or scoffed, or both. He admits it’s a really pleasant place to visit, but it frustrates him.

Ron sees something disappointing in how it’s preserved a Dutch identity very specific to the time of its founding, while the original Holland has stayed progressive and adaptable. He says it happens anytime a large group immigrates together – they clump up and stick to their old ways instead of assimilating into their surroundings, and while this has many benefits, it can cause a community to stay dangerously conservative and disconnected. To Ron, Holland, Michigan’s preservation of old Dutch ways is closely tied with the area’s continued political and religious conservatism, hardly different from groups of immigrants and refugees in Europe who stay together simply to survive in a difficult new country. Ron sees the parents failing to learn the new language as their kids do, then being totally unaware of their kids’ complex identities and totally shocked when they run away to join ISIS. Of course it isn’t fair to assume that happens in all immigrant communities, but it’s true that ISIS continually draws new members from disillusioned, disconnected second-generation European immigrants.

It’s strange to think of the town that was my home for five or six years as the result of a stubborn, failed assimilation. It was also strange to be in the country that town was trying to emulate, and to see that aside from some brick patterns and windmills and proper place names, there’s not a lot in common. The places’ tones are completely different, irrevocably divergent. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I would have never seen it if I hadn’t been there, and I wouldn’t have understood it if I hadn’t gotten a lift down to Rotterdam with Ron.

England To Belgium; My Night in Brussels

After writing my London post, I had a leisurely brunch with Lucy, packed up my clean clothes, and took some public transit toward a place in the southeast reaches of London called Mottingham, whose name absolutely sounds made up. There’s a gas station there that hitchhikers like to hitch from to get towards the tunnel and ferries at Dover. I must have lost my marker on Stonehenge day, so I wasn’t able to make a sign, but it worked out okay. A guy named Simeon, in casual business attire and a blue SUV, picked me up in minutes.

Simeon has lived in several countries and traveled through dozens more. Now he’s in his 50s, and looking younger, but he freshly remembers htiching around Europe and is eager to help travelers. He took me a few miles out of town, to a spot where I got another lift from Peter, an older guy with a big ol’ belly who decided to take me all the way to the service station before the Channel Tunnel, which was exactly my goal. His interest in my travels mostly revolved around how much sex he hoped I was having, a topic he circled back to several times in the most disappointingly crude ways. Peter is a prime example of people whom I’d be pretty quick to judge if not for the immense generosity they showed to me as a hitchhiker. He was a little evasive about his original destination, but he definitely went out of his way for me.

I was hungry, so I had some truck-stop fast-food Chinese, a decision I would thoroughly regret that evening. I had to wait a little while at the service station exit, but a lift came, a really good one. It was two Englishwomen, a college-age girl at the wheel and a young mother in the passenger seat. They’d met for the first time only minutes before, and they were heading to the ferry that would take their car from Dover to Calais, where they were signed up to volunteer for the week. Calais has a lot of refugees, and they just keep coming, hoping to illegally smuggle their way across the channel into the UK. The women didn’t know how they would be put to use yet. I admire them. There was supposed to be a third volunteer in the car, but she’d bailed at the last minute, so they actually had an extra ticket that would have gone to waste. And that’s how I got across the English Channel for free.

Maybe I didn’t see the right parts of it, but Calais seemed like kind of a dump, a run-down stopover built around the ferry system. Lodging was stupidly expensive, but it was getting too late to hitch out, and I’d read about shantytowns of refugees being broken up regularly by police on the town’s outskirts, so I didn’t feel great about camping. My mom had offered to cover the cost of a few hotels if it was ever an issue of safety, so I decided to let her help me out this time – not that I couldn’t afford it, but because knowing that that was on the table kept me from waffling about the decision too much. If not for the issue of safety, I’d have probably slept outside someplace and saved the Euros for when they’d be better spent, in better company.

The hotel room was smelly and dark and covered in black mold. The TV didn’t work, and in the bathroom, perched on the radiator, were two nearly exhausted spools of pink toilet paper; barely enough. The only hostel in Calais was booked up with volunteers, last minute Couchsurfing requests hadn’t come through, and for some reason AirBnB was running really slowly on my phone, so this was the cheapest option. I knew what I was getting into.

In the morning I walked a lot, my first destination an international truck stop that Hitchwiki had recommended in years past. Now it was swarming with refugees, African and Middle Eastern, milling about or sitting quietly. It was eerie, but I didn’t feel unsafe – there was a huddle of police around something when I first arrived – it was just disconcerting to be around so much silent, anxious desperation.

That was at the northeast end of Calais. I walked another hour or so to the southeast edge of town, where another good hitching spot was supposed to be, and when I finally got there, I quickly found a lift from Erik, a German truck driver with American parents who was going all the way to Trier, in Germany, far to the east. I wanted to go north after getting out of France. Luckily, he meant to go through Brussels, a city I was interested in. He bought me a coffee at a gas station on Brussels’ outskirts, and from there I thumbed my way into the city center with Marc, and older Belgian academic type, an art historian and teacher. He offered me some fresh cherries and left me near the city center with a big bottle of water.

Brussels is a beautiful city, its central area all vast, ornate facades with turrets and spires. Belgium’s persona us strange, a mishmashed overlap of Dutch and French, with Brussels right in the middle of it. With my limited knowledge and research, the main attraction for me was the snacks – fries and waffles of the most perfect texture, with so many varieties of flavors and toppings. In my less than 24 hours in Brussels I had each thing twice. That’s pretty much all I ate in Brussels, actually – waffles and fries. Maybe not a great lifestyle, but a delicious visit.

Busking went really well for me that night. One doesn’t expect a lot from a Tuesday night busk, but I found a nice quiet corridor with steady foot traffic, where my music resonated really nicely, and I made a good 50 Euros, more than enough to cover my hostel and snacks and some really crisp Belgian beer.

In the morning I took the tram to the north edge of town and waited a good while, turning down a couple short lifts, until a couple women from Antwerp picked me up. I half-dozed while they spoke merrily in Dutch in the front seat, deciding to take me a little farther than Antwerp, to a town just barely in the Netherlands. I’ll tell that story soon.

Belgium doesn’t have a strong sense of identity the way England or France does. You may not have a stereotype about Belgians. I really knew nothing about the country before being dropped off in it. To be honest, I still kind of don’t. But Brussels is beautiful, the people are nice, and the snacks are truly the topmost notch.

 

London Etc.

Any way you sort it, London is in the top tier of cities. It’s huge, diverse, creative, culturally and politically relevant to the world, and pretty cool. Most of the rest of the UK told me to keep my expectations down, as the people wouldn’t be as generous or welcoming, but I already knew that. The bigger cities get, the more similar they become. I was expecting New York City with English accents, basically.

I spent my first night night in the extra room of Miranda, a friend from Pittsburgh who’s living in a different country every month for a year. She was just getting back from Belgium in time to frantically catch up on remote work and go on another trip to Ireland, so we didn’t really have time for a proper catch-up, but it was nice to see her. After that I stayed with Lucy, an old friend of my mother’s. They met in the ’70s when my mom was working and traveling in England for a little while. I last saw Lucy in the late ’90s, when she last visited Chicago, but she’s been generally aware of me in the meantime, and when I e-mailed her months ago about this trip, she was enthusiastically welcoming.

I’ve now been in London a little over a week. Most days I would take a slow morning of writing or reading, maybe doing laundry or listening to a podcast, often having long chats with Lucy about travel or politics. She always reminds me how impressed she is with the audacity of what I’m doing, although she’s traveled and hitchhiked herself in different parts of the world. Our conversations leave me feeling refreshed and inspired. She has two creative kids around my age who drop by occasionally, and I imagine she’s had a lot of practice cheerleading for bold, unorthodox decisions.

A typical day of my London stay continues with me taking the tube or a bus to some new area of London (there are lots, and between Lucy, Jane, friends, and the internet, I have a lot of leads on where to go), and exploring on foot, taking my banjo with me in case I stumble onto a nice busking opportunity. I’ll find something fun to eat, and if I feel like I’m done with the area, I’ll just walk to another one.

Like any city of its size, London truly has something for everyone. Shoreditch is supposed to be the hipster area, where the restaurants are self-aware and cool and places like Rough Trade Records’ flagship store give the place some indisputable indie cred. Soho is ritzy and pricey, and it stays alive deep into the night with festive gay bars and cute restaurants and big-deal theater productions, even though the busking tips are pretty dry. West and south of there you’ll find a lot of the big tourist draws, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, some big palaces housing royals about whom I know less than anyone. There are areas that are cheaper and grungier, the types of places where normal people would scrape together a living, full of ethnic barbers and cheap Indian food and storefronts untouched since the ’80s. And there’s Brixton, where I stayed, a diverse, out-of-the-way area whose central areas are full of young people and music at night. My favorite was Camden Town, a lively yet unpretentious neighborhood to the north whose sprawling market complex is packed with dozens of global pop-up food vendors, and whose little boutique stores made shopping for clothes actually seem exciting to me.

I saw only a fraction of London, but I think I’ve developed a feel for it. It’s a bit less cynical, less grumpy, than New York or L.A., and there’s a very British grandeur to its more refined parts. It’s still a crazy busy city – if you try to take the tube anywhere in central London during a busy time, which is most of the time, you’ll be lucky to make it through the heaving mass of waiting riders to pack yourself like a crayon into a sweaty, swaying train car. It’s prices like these, as well as actual high prices, that you pay for living in a place like London, but I can see why it’s worth it to people. But stay there for a few days and you too will find yourself scowling at pushy cars and angrily weaving around slow-walking tourists on the sidewalk. With so many people congesting such a fast-paced culture, it’s hard to maintain a compassionate worldview – maybe in the broad, ideal sense, but not towards the actual human bodies crowding you in. Everybody in England acknowledges that the closer to London you go, the less friendly people get. It’s a trade-off.

Musically, I busked at a couple open-air markets and did pretty well, although the nightlife is pretty hard to please. On Thursday night I played at a quiet little open mic in Brixton, after a singer-songwriter playing typically bluesy, jazzy, coffeehouse fare and dude singing very theatrical dance pop over brash backing tracks. I was well received, and I spent the night making happy conversation with appreciative listeners. People recognized the Tallest Man On Earth song I played, which is always cool – but not as cool as the middle-aged guy from Tennessee who yelled “Sufjan!” when he heard my cover at the Portobello Market, clapped me happily on the shoulder, and tipped me a U.S. dollar.

I’m typing this from Lucy’s old Windows XP computer on my last morning in London. Yesterday I hitchhiked out to see Stonehenge, waiting about an hour for each lift (practically American wait times!), riding with Andy, an ex-military guy from Blackpool who wishes he could travel to the states but probably can’t because of his criminal record; a young Spanish guy from Madrid who works in an English factory and has hitchhiked a few times; Ash, a trainee EMT; and James and Emily, who were driving back to their home in Plymouth, all teh way on the southwestern coast, and dropped me off at the Stonehenge visitor center.

Stonehenge itself was a real marvel to behold, so imposing and surreal in its ancientness, an artifact from a long lost world. But even if you pay (I didn’t, so I had to stand like five yards behind the official viewing area), you can’t get that close. If you want the stones to loom above you and give you a transcendent, soul-altering experience, you may be disappointed by the current setup. But it’s still worth having seen. It’s also a Pokemon gym, obviously.

I hitched from Stonehenge to a service station with a little family who was pulling off for dinner, then stood in the drizzle for half an hour before getting the perfect lift, a guy going all the way to London and beyond. His name was something like Yan, and he’s an old Romani Gypsy with polio. He grew up in England, traveling around by caravan (RV). When asked about it, he tells people, “When you open the door to your house, where does it go? The garden? The yard? When I open my door, I have the world.” He was a truck driver for much of his life, but when his polio resurged (he wears two complex-looking braces on his weak legs) he wasn’t allowed to drive anymore, so he started driving independently instead. Now he has a one-man, word-of-mouth business driving cars and caravans from country to country for other gypsies who perhaps just bought a vehicle or took a flight and need their car or caravan to be someplace else. Yan drives all over Europe and loves it. He’ll be in Germany and Norway this week. His 12-year-old granddaughter goes with him a lot of the time, but she’s a bit weary of it and isn’t going on his next trip.

He dropped me off a few towns south of London. It was almost dark, and after I got a lift one town north with a teenage Domino’s delivery driver, I took a couple buses to complete the trip, getting back after 11:00.

Today I’m hitching towards Dover to try to take the train or ferry to France. Depending on whether I meet Andrew and friends in Madrid or Barcelona, I have one or two weeks of unassigned time, during which I’ll dive headfirst into non-Anglosphere Europe. I’m going to try to get into Belgium tonight, then the Netherlands, then southward. I’ll see southern France on my way into Spain, Paris possibly later, and probably northern Italy with Jane in early September (did I mention that? Maybe not). With the exception of Iceland, no place on this trip has been far outside of my comfort zone as an American, so it feels like in some ways the challenging part of the trip is just beginning. I’ll let you know.

 

 

Friends in York, A Night In Leicester, So Many Pokémon

I’d had a really nice time in Manchester, but now that I was flying solo again, there wasn’t much reason to stay, and Lauren in York would have a couple days off from work soon, so it was time to visit. And besides, I finally had Pokémon Go, so it was really time to start getting around and catching them all. A bus took me to a roundabout that was supposed to be good for hitching northeast, but construction had tightened the on-ramp from the roundabout into one narrow lane, so it wasn’t going to be easy for cars to see me or pull over. But a guy named Tom took me a few stops down the main road to where I’d have a better time, and I didn’t have to wait long at the new spot before getting another lift.

My driver’s name was Paul. Paul was awesome. He was a friendly older dude who remembered hitchhiking around northern England as recently as 25 years ago. He and his Irish wife had both done their share in their youth. When I told him I would be in Spain in a month and I’d heard hitching was hard there, he told me that he’d done it and had decent luck. Several times he’d gotten lifts from gay men hoping for favors, which he remembered as a distinctly Spanish-hitchhiking thing, but he’d never gotten into a situation where he’d felt unsafe. Athens was  the city he remembered having the worst time hitching out of, though.

We talked about Trump, inevitably, and Brexit. When I shared with Paul the perspective of the non-xenophobe pro-leave Brit I’d hitched with in Ireland, he shook his head and said something like “doesn’t he know rich people in England know how to fuck over the working class just as well as rich people in the rest of the EU?” He wasn’t having it.

He was going to Halifax, which is a little ways before Leeds, almost halfway to York. Leeds is a little city in the north that I still don’t really know much about – people generally approved of it, but no one was telling me to go there. Getting into Leeds would bring the trouble of getting out of Leeds, it being a city and all, so the best thing would be to get a lift from someone going straight through and beyond. The hitching spot by Halifax was good, and I turned down a couple of rides, but I finally decided to take my chances and accept a lift into Leeds. This driver was yet another Paul, one who lived in Leeds and had a tattoo of a ring on his wedding finger. He was a nice guy, and the trip was short.

In Leeds I caught a wild Parasect, a terrifying bug/grass Pokémon that’s basically an insect whose brain functions have been taken over by a parasitic fungus, which is a phenomenon that happens in real life. Pokémon has some heavy stuff, guys. I walked through the train station to get a peek at my options, then busked in the pedestrian city center for a little while. At some point a couple of young buskers played a really hammy version of “Wonderwall,” where the singer/guitarist was doing all these frilly vocal lines over the melody, and a second dude started beatboxing over the second verse, all blasted through an amp. My own nook was pretty quiet, since my act can’t really compete with amplifiers, but after twenty or thirty minutes of playing, a guy playing electric violin over backing tracks set up not even forty feet away from me and proceeded to completely drown me out. I was grumpy and confronted him on my way out, not demanding that he stop, but just pointing out that what he’d done was really rude. He spoke with an accent, and I’m not sure if he understood me at all.

Walking out of Leeds to where I would get a lift seemed tough, and I didn’t feel like it, so I took the rain to York instead, meeting Lauren in the walled city center in the summery afternoon. Leeds is a very old town whose history is well preserved, with an epic cathedral and ancient walls. Lauren tells me that in York and the area surrounding it, there’s a church for every week of the year, and a pub for every day. The city center itself is full of winding streets too narrow for cars, and lots of foot traffic. The busking is a little competitive, but there are more than enough places to play. My last night in York was a Friday night, and I made good money night-busking.

I knew Lauren at Hope College. We did a mission trip to Queens, NY, together, and subsequently I dated and married one of her housemates for a bit. While at Hope Lauren did a study program in York, and she went back there for an advanced degree after graduating, at which point she met Matt, a thoroughly English guy who swept her off her feet with, I assume, his kind nature and adorable Britishness – throughout the week he would say these unbearably English things in his fine accent, like “Oh, I quite like poppadoms,” and I would stifle a big goofy smile at how perfectly he embodied my idea of Englishness.

Lauren hadn’t originally intended to move to York and marry a guy and settle down there, and I hadn’t heard much from her since the move, so I was  very curious to see how she was getting on. Marriage can be beautiful, but it can also be scary and overwhelming. I was hesitant to expect the best. But while she does miss the States and acknowledges the little sacrifices that have come with living abroad, their relationship itself is something special. They’re a great team, affectionate and genuinely appreciative of each other. They share common values in a deep way, but their personalities are pretty complementary – Lauren more creative and empathetic, an English major and ESL teacher, and Matt a curiously analytical software engineer who appreciates Lauren profoundly. But the sweetest thing in the world to me is how they’ve met in the middle on video games. Matt is a casual but committed PC gamer, and he’s invested in a few good cooperative indie games that they can play together on their respective screens, welcoming her into his hobby in a gentle way.

Lauren hasn’t picked up the accent much, but she’s started to pick up the vernacular and mannerisms of the English, the most entertaining being the tendency to apologize automatically for the most unnecessary things, like being bumped by a rude person or a free-swinging door. But all our mutual friends will be glad to hear she’s doing great. It’s taken time for her to find a social life and career in York, and the possibility of permanently living in the UK is something they’ll likely have to wrestle with as time goes on, but she may be the happiest I’ve ever seen her, and to be able to say that in your twenties is a very cool thing.

Buoyed by the warmth of genuine hospitality from good friends (and the new teaser material for Rogue One and the trailer for Rebels season 3 from Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016’s live stream), I left last Saturday to head south. A friend of mine in London (from Pittsburgh) would host me on Sunday night, and subsequently I would stay with an old friend of my mom, but Saturday night was up in the air. I would hitchhike south and try to end up someplace fun for night-busking before making my way to London the next morning.

After a short lift west to the main southbound road, I found a long lift with an ex-military guy named Craig, a former soldier who now worked in private security – celebrities he’s covered security for include Foo Fighters, One Direction, and Jessie J, who is apparently an insufferable diva. He took me to a short one with a girl whose details I’ve forgotten, and a final lift into Leicester with a couple of old hippies from Glastonbury, I was in the city center of what could be considered England’s first multicultural small city – for several decades it’s been an attractive destination for immigrants and refugees, so it’s very ethnically diverse, and there’s a lot of great food. I learned all this from my drivers and Google – until then, I’d only heard of them because of their recent football success, which is such a crazy underdog story that I’m sure it’ll be made into a movie soon.

I found a place to stay, wandered around looking for food (settling eventually on cheap curry and gelato), and finally set up to busk. It took a couple hours to find a busy, pubby section that fit my acoustics, but when I finally found my groove I made good money. One group of happy drunk lads tipped me 20 quid, so of course I played as many of the group’s goofy requests as I could muster – obvious Oasis and Mumford and Sons, but also Foo Fighters and Noah and the Whale. One guy asked for Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire, but his buddies had no idea who those were and drowned him out. By the end of the night I’d made 50 or 60 pounds, turned down two offers to go clubbing, had a nice little phone chat with Jane and her best bud Kelly, and gotten to sleep just before the sun came up.

The next day it took me a couple hours to get to the hitching spot across town because I kept stopping at Pokémon gyms, but I eventually made it, finding a quick lift from another ex-military guy named Pete, who saw action in the Iraq war and now works on oil rigs. He was on his way to drop off his laundry at his mom’s, but after that he took me to a busy service station on the main road to London. I bought some cold little mango chunks and munched on them while holding my thumb out for cars getting back on the highway.

After about half an hour with no luck, two sisters picked me up, on their way from Sheffield to London to visit their dad. I asked Hannah, the driver, about the Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur tattoos on her arm, and the three of us got into an excited chat about Pokémon Go and how fun it is. Turns out Hannah’s also a songwriter with a degree in music stuff – composition or something – who’s floundering a bit in her 20s figuring out what to do with an education that’s not as practically useful as she’d hoped. I’d been there in a lot of ways, so we had a lot to talk about, bouncing between busking and Star Trek and weird character interactions in anime.

And then I was in London, and I’m there now. For the first time on this trip, I’m sort of caught up! Let’s hear it, everybody.