hitchhike
Day 1: The Hague to Frankfurt
1. Our first driver’s Tim (23) who once had a gaming YouTube channel and says he’ll reach out to me about film things.
2. A girl we went to high school with and her family pick us up on their way to a Muse concert. Two hours in their car takes us over the German border.
3. A lovely German couple back from dropping off their two sons at the airport drive us, and we link on social media.
4. A Romanian man eager to help out but who simultaneously had some funny business going on with other license plates in the trunk.
5. A very nice, young visual artist whose car is filled with a vast portfolio of paintings and is on her way back from an art school she’s applying to. She’s eager to have us take a peek at her work!
🛏️ In Frankfurt, we use a couchsurfing app to find lodging with two very nice guys we learn are Syrian refugees, and at night they show us around town.
Day 2: Frankfurt to Nuremberg
6. A nice (I’m going to say people are nice very often because they all are) German couple take us to the airport.
7. Johannes, German and in the audio systems business, takes us onto the Autobahn.
8. We ride for a while with Sven, a well-traveled, snowboarding Dutchman who makes the trip from Holland to Regensburg every Sunday. He has the occasional stutter, and a son our age studying game design. He gives us his business card to call him if we need an emergency ride home at any point.
9. We give up on reaching Prague today and ride with a young Dutch guy who’s interning with Adidas just outside Nuremberg. He’s got some clear bruises on his face from what he says was a wild night out he can’t remember.
🛏️ It’s a bit late for arranging a couchsurfing stay so we sleep in a hostel.
Day 3: Nuremberg to Prague
10. A German man in textiles suggests we go to Prague via Dresden, and so we head in that direction with him.
11. We drive to Dresden all the way with Ellen, a nurse who seems a little tired from many hours behind the wheel.
12. We find a Frisian schoolbus! Going directly to Prague! The supervising teacher is first unsure about letting two hitchhikers on a bus full of 15-year-olds, but the students vote to keep us on the bus. They came from Buitenpost — the destination of our very first driver, Tim.
13. The schoolbus stops for dinner, so we ride with the driver of a small truck, a Czech man with no family (“yet!”) who also teaches us some basic Czech.
🛏️ we sleep in a 12-person hostel room.
Day 4: we walk about in Prague.
Day 5: Prague to Bratislava
14. A very nice Slovakian man named Fero, in the business of developing pharmaceutical database software, and he just came from a meeting even though he was supposed to have holiday today. He hitchhiked a couple times when he was younger, once all the way to Scotland where he picked strawberries to pay for the journey. He rides a motorcycle, skis, and doesn’t have a family.
Day 6: Bratislava to Vienna
15. Two nice guys from eastern Slovakia—one is named Jan—working in a car factory for Audi and BMW in Austria
🛏️ In Vienna, we meet two nice girls around our age in a Korean restaurant and they show us around town a little. We’re able to stay in one of their houses for the night.
Day 7: Vienna to Budapest
16. Bosnian Serb, Aleksa, has a son and daughter and another child on the way. He tells us Bosnians are much nicer than Serbians, and I fall asleep in the car.
🛏️ We stay with Dordzji’s schoolmates from his time in Belgrade, sleeping in a tent in their back garden.
Day 8: we explore Budapest on foot and today is the city’s huge annual pride parade.
Day 9: Budapest to Szeged
17. Atilla (the “Hun”garian) brings us to an IKEA. He’s renovating a flat in Budapest to either rent out or leave to his kids, a son (11) and daughter, Dora (15).
18. An older Hungarian couple from Szeged, both economists and both with children in their thirties from previous marriages. They’ve been together for 20+ years and together have a daughter finishing her third year in econ. The husband had hitchhiked as a young man, which he found to be easy coming home in military uniform.
🛏️ At the end of the day, we’ve been stuck at a gas station for five hours until well past dark. We’re no longer reaching Belgrade, so we arrange a deal with the gas station attendants for one of them to drive us to a hostel in nearby Szeged.
Day 10: Szeged to Niš
19. A Polish couple bound for Albania on vacation drive us in their convertible with the roof down! The harsh wind on the highway is oddly calming, and it’s too loud for any conversation. They drop us off at Kalemagdan.
20. Software engineer, Nikolai, drives us to a gas station further down the highway. In the back is a baby seat.
21. A friendly Serbian who hitchhiked to Belgrade for his studies every day when he was younger! Wow.
22. A French blacksmith, Nico, heading all the way to China (somewhere in the desert near Urumqi) in his small Fiat Panda for a project. He unsheathes for one of his own knives for us. Very cool.
🛏️ We have a drink with Nico and end up in the same hostel and room, too.
Day 11: Niš to Plovdiv
On a hike to a gas station, we find a tortoise motionless on train tracks (?!). I assume it knows what it’s doing, but with the possibility that it’s trapped by the rails, I lift it carefully off the tracks.
Day 12: Plovdiv to Istanbul
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