Valde expeditione

write a summary of the trip, and it has been a bit longer than I expected, but oh well, all the more time to think. I'll try my hardest to stay away from the "travel brochure" style that I could write this in "This was great, I learned much!" and so on, but at times it will be impossible to avoid.

If anyone is ever thinking of doing what we did, or more, firstly I would flat out insist that they go and do it for themselves, you will have the time of your life. Be warned however, make sure that the person you go with is the right one, make sure your friendship is strong enough to survive the trip and everything it throws at you - plus you're going to be stuck with them for however long the trip takes, so you better get along, at least the slim majority of the time.

Also, another key thing, be certain they want to do it, and truly will pull their weight. Me and Buzzy shared out all the shit as much as possible, the one thing that would of made me give up by the 3rd night would be if I had to do all the work, carry 90% of the stuff, and cook/clean/set up the tent/etc. Make sure that the person you take with you is at least capable of what is asked of them.

A fairly uneventful day all in all, as at about noon (again) we get up and decide to walk into Paris and do as much of the free tourist shit that we can.

We walk up to the Arc de Triumphe, down the Champs d'llysees, get ripped for some water and change then remaining Kroner back into Euros - that's an extra €13 in the pocket for free!

Cross the bridge outside of the Grande Palais and cut back up to the Eiffle Tower.

Lying on the grass - and confirming that it is just a giant penis - 3 Army guys walk past, no more than 2ft away, carrying  fully loaded FAMAS'. Buzzy swoons, I mention that it is typical of the French to send 3 fags to guard a giant penis, and they fuck off.

We get up at about noon - not having to be anywhere is great - and work out what to do for the day.

First priority is to find a cyber cafe so we can upload these damn entries.

Second is try to get to the airport to see if we can change the flights to a few days prior, like Monday or something.

We decide that - due to our limited amount of Euros - we will walk down to the metro, and as we know the way now and that it's only about 3.5km AND we don't have our bags (yay!) it will be a nice walk, in the sunshine.

We get to the metro and - after texting the Mrs to use her internets to find me a series of tubes - we go hunting.

We rise - even more demoralised as we have only made it 36km from Bordeaux thank to the first lift of the day fucking us royally - pack up, and move on.

Neither of us fancy the epic trek back, and as we are no more than 500m from the N10 - at this point dual-carriage way - we jump the barrier and march the wrong way up the hard shoulder, much to the dismay of many a passing motorist.

Running scaringly low on water, and the resturant being closed, we decide that one of us (read: she) will sit in the shade, and the other (read: me) wacks our thumb out.

20 mins later we get picked up by a German family living in Spain going to Paris...SCORE!

Hot.

We both look over at each other, look at the atlas, look back, and sigh.

We both become aware that the other is demoralised as fuck, tired and...well...we want to slow down.

We get up and pack everything away and get to Pedro (not the Spanish guys name, but I can't remember it)'s cab for 0700h.

And wait.

And wait.

At 1000h Buzzy finally knocks on the window - after I had shotgunned not to do it 2h30m before - and 10 seconds laterthe engine fires up.

The rest of the trip to Bordeaux was spent largely sleeping and except for the pork chops and spag - mostly uneventful and boring.

After an amazing breakfast of bacon and eggs and a shower we set off. Wernies drops us off at a truck stop right on the Dutch/Belgian border.

On the road again, I can't wait to get on the road again. Or, well, maybe not. It gets to about 1300h, and Buzzy and I have a look at the map, see just how far we have to get, and this sparks the convo I've been dreading from the beginning.

"What happens if we don't get picked up?"

Amazingly, this is the first time this has been brought up, at least in the open. Before now it had just been expected. But the difference now was that we have to average 200 miles - 320km - a day.

As there is only 40km or so from Koln to Aachen we decide to sleep in, and at 1000h we get a shower and pack up, leaving the site at around 12noon.

We follow the directions the Belgians have us yesturday but must have missed a turning. We get to the bridge however, but find that there is a massive barrier - we're talking 10ft tall wall of metal and bullet proof glass. We walk along the bridge, drop down the other side and start to look for a place to meet the road again. After 30 mins of wandering aimlessly, Buzzy sees a group of women walking their dogs, and asks for directions. They are somewhat vague, and not the biggest help in the world, but eventually we get back to the road.

We emerge from the tent to be greeted by rain, we pack our shit and get the tent back in it's bag as fast as we can, and make our way back towards the road.

There we stand, in the pissing rain, watching car's stream past us as they race for the mainland in groups. The ferry will empty, and then there is no more car's till the next ferry arrives, which took about 30 minutes. We would try and take refuge under some nearby trees - which didn't really work. We must have been standing at that ferry port a good 3 hours (plus the 2 hours the night before, making it our biggest delay so far) until an Australian pair pick us up.

It transpiers that they actually thought that there was only 1 of us (read: Buzzy) and if they noticed there were in fact 2 of us, they wouldn't of stopped. I fucking hate humanity at times.

I wake up about 10am, and start to update a few of the entries from previously in the week, I get up to about Wednesday, I think, and to be honest, I can't be arsed to remember, so fuck you all. We watch a bit of TV, go down to a pen shop to grab some more pens, and at about 4pm we make our way for the city edge.

After traversing the city, and working out where the fuck we are going, we get a lift by a bloke called Tony. He was born in North London, but moved to Denmark when he took a teaching job 35+ years ago, for a year...and never left. He had also done many hitching trips, and had many, many interesting stories to tell, even ones including Laurence Oliver. It really was a shame that we didn't manage to stay much longer with him, as he only took us 20km down the road, but what we did here was both amazing and inspiring. Anyone that pays close attention to this site, will know for me to say that really does mean a lot, and it's meant to. This man was legend.