Day 13 – Like Drowned Rats

Date: 8th of July 2015

Route: Rotterdam – Bremen

Vehicles hitchhiked: 7

After leaving Ela and Marcin's flat, while we were walking to the place where we wanted to hitchhike, we did the shopping, and bought stroopwafels and a very tasty “sliced cheese” from coconut.

It was raining cats and dogs that day, so standing near a road wasn't particularly pleasant; but, on the other hand, it was a new experience for us. We had to put a direction card in a plastic document sleeve so that it wouldn't soak.

Standing in the rain

Unfortunately, we hadn’t learned our lesson, and missed one occasion to be taken. When we finally noticed that someone had stopped behind us, it had been already going away.

After about an hour of waiting in the rain, we caught a lift to Utrecht (we decided to visit this city on the way to Bremen). The driver was very helpful and he suggested that we go and see city canals; we followed his advice and checked out a coffeeshop on the way.

Signs that the Netherlands is a very tolerant country were visible in Utrecht as well :-)

After sightseeing for a while, we tried to get back to a motorway towards Bremen. Maia wanted to go there with a shorter path, but it transpired to be a very bad idea – after walking for some time through high grass, and then through bushes and small trees, we found ourselves surrounded by ditches (full of dirty water) from three sides. Maia wanted to cross through them, and took off her shoes; fortunately, I managed to explain to her that we probably shouldn't be stinky if we wanted to catch a ride… So we came back with the same route.

What we “gained” from her idea was water in our shoes. Moreover, we had to throw out her destroyed hat and two pairs of my soaked socks.

Like drowned rat

We waited until it stopped raining, and then went to stand next to a slip road, where we tried to catch a lift. After several minutes a Dutch marriage allowed us into their car. I am not sure if it was because of the air-conditioning, or because of standing outside in wet clothes for a long time, but I was shivering from cold while sitting in the car.

The couple left us on a petrol station next to a road to Enschede. There, we ate rolls prepared in the morning, and bought cups of hot chocolate to warm ourselves up. Maia came up with an idea to dry her shoes using a hand-dryer in a station toilet.

Drying shoes in a hand-dryer

Two guys whom we asked to take us from the station seemed to like the idea of having hitchhikers in their car a lot. They offered to drive us almost to Enschede, which wasn’t on the way for them. They were quite friendly, but their lifestyle didn't seem to be very healthy – one of them smoked three cigarettes within the 20 minutes during which we were sitting in the car.

There were lots of trucks on a parking lot where they left us, so we thought that we could try hitchhiking in one of them. Unfortunately, none of the foreign truckers was willing to take two passengers. When we talked with Polish ones, the situation was different – the only reason they didn't want to help us was the fact that they were driving in another direction. Luckily, one guy from Chojnice (a town in Poland) was going to Berlin through Osnabrück, and he agreed to give us a lift.

This time Maia and I didn't share a seat – I sat on the front, and Maia sat on a sleeping place behind seats. The driver only asked her to hide somewhere from German Polizei, when we were about to cross the border. I generally liked the ride, and learned a lot about working as a trucker.

The next car that we managed to hitchhike was a Polish car as well. The friendly driver, who had worked and lived in Germany for a couple of years, advised us to visit the Kreuzberg district if we were in Berlin.

We got off his car on a parking lot next to a motorway towards Bremen. We didn't have luck there – none of the drivers that we asked agreed to give us a lift. We tried standing next to the exit of the parking lot, and then near its entry, but unfortunately we didn't manage to stop anyone in neither of those places. Resigned, we started walking back towards the parking lot, in order to ask a new group of people who had come there for help.

Suddenly, we saw a car backing towards us; its driver invited us inside. It turned out that he had used to hitchhike a lot as well when he had been younger. He had often hitchhiked with his girlfriend and a dog. In order to be more successful in catching a lift, he had used to hide in bushes with the dog, while the girl had been standing near roads alone. Whenever someone had stopped to help her, they had suddenly appeared next to her.

We left the car when it stopped on red lights on a crossroad on the outskirts of Bremen. Maia started asking people who stopped behind the driver if they could help us; she managed to persuade a woman, who had also hitchhiked in the past, to give us a lift. She was so kind that she drove us almost directly to our host's flat – we walked for only one minute to get there.

Our host's kitchen - we liked its style

Mascha, our host, was very hospitable. She prepared pasta with sauce for us, and allowed us to use her washing machine to do the laundry. What is more, she was a really interesting person, who had travelled a lot, and had done many impressive things in her life.

We had had enough of rain that day, so we decided not to walk around Bremen in the evening. We stayed in the flat instead, and enjoyed conversations with Mascha and her flatmates – Fabian and Ania.