Do you have any idea how far down the road you'd have to travel to safely pull over on a straight stretch of a busy European highway? Let me tell you, it's pretty damn far. So far, in fact John and I almost didn't notice we snagged a ride on that particular leg of our hitchhiking odyssey across Holland and Denmark.
"I think we got a ride", John yelled over his shoulder as he took off down the highway his knapsack bouncing in a rather uncomfortable looking way from his shoulder.
Despite John's apparent sense of urgency I hesitated, not registering that we had actually managed to flag down one of the vehicles that had been zooming past us at autobahn speed and greater for the past 20 minutes. I squinted into the distance.
"Wait! Where?!" I managed to scream back before he was out of earshot.
John screeched to a halt, "Down there!" he waved ambiguously and with some measure of impatience into the distance before taking off again as fast as his haphazardly hoisted baggage would allow.
I kept my spot and squinted into the sunlight. A good kilometre, maybe closer to two kilometres, down the highway I noticed what appeared to be a speck of a conspicuous looking windowless black van. Now, I'd already accepted that in agreeing to hitchhike in a foreign locale with a relative stranger, I'd acquiesced to practicing a higher than average level of tolerance for getting myself into potentially risky situations, but in this case, my instincts got the better of me. Something told me there was something terrifically out-of-the ordinary with this arrangement. Meh.
A short second later I was running after John with my own backpack bouncing irritatingly from side to side at my back - those things just aren't designed for running. And yes, it turned out we had managed to secure a ride. By the time I arrived at the parked van, panting and out of breath having sprinted three kilometres with 30 lbs of weight on my back, John was already perched in the passenger seat with a huge, 'I told you so' grin on his face. More than that, it was somewhat of an 'you're-not-going-to-believe-our-dumb-luck' grin.
Our benefactor, Brit, was on-route to the festival with the Lemonheads' gear in tow and offered to not only drive us to the festival, but also to get us in for free. Seriously. I kid you not.
 |
| Our ride to Roskilde |
A few friends have asked me to write about how I came to use the name, theotherlondon, so here it is: a collection of stories from June 1993 to October 1994 that include my experiences working in Switzerland and the UK; my engagement to a German blacksmith in Paris; our road trip across North America in a ’67 Volvo with an Australian footballer, and oh yes, my introduction to something ‘new’ called the Internet. You can find the first post here.
No comments:
Post a Comment