Hitching France Pt. 1

This series of posts will be about a three-week, 2,000-mile hitchhiking journey around France which I undertook in September of 2017. I consider it to be a very valuable and memorable experience in my life as well as an accomplishment that I am very proud of and thankful for. I certainly do not intend to boast or claim to be a seasoned hitchhiker, or even traveler. There are many more audacious and adventurous hitchhikers who have come before me and who are still hitchhiking now. I only want to share my story for those who may be interested to hear the experience of someone who had never hitchhiked before and went on to complete a bold endeavor. I will start from the beginning.

One summer, a few years before I would even think about backpacking, I worked a few jobs with a chimney sweep in my town. Naturally, on the drives and on the jobs, we would talk a lot about this, that and the other but I was blown away by the stories he told me of his hitchhiking adventures around the U.S. in the late ’70s. These adventures started during his high school summer vacations and would eventually take him through each state twice and even to Canada. At the time, I simply couldn’t imagine doing what he did. It seemed crazy and I had always been told that it was dangerous, even though my own mother did some hitchhiking while she studied abroad in Europe. Still, like most people, it seemed reckless to jump in strangers’ cars, so actively trying to seems to defy everything you were taught as a youngster growing up. Plus, I thought it was a dying art. Though, in some respects and places in the world, it is. By the end of the summer I think maybe I began to understand the adventure in it, but I couldn’t see myself doing it.

Fast forward three years later and I am volunteering in a hostel in Budapest. It was June. I graduated university in May, took the CFA level I exam in June, the results of which I would receive in July, and a week later I connected three flights to arrive into Budapest late at night. The stories from the hostel days can be expounded upon another time but I was intrigued when I learned from a few other travelers that they recently had to rely on hitchhiking during their travels. Initially, my interest was piqued, and an idea started to grow. Then one night, I was sitting on the balcony of the hostel with a girl from Germany. She was beautiful and had a curious hippie soul. She mentioned that her and the two friends whom she was traveling with had been hitchhiking around the southern part of Germany for some time before they had ventured to Budapest. She told me about all the interesting people they met, her insight on their experiences and that while it wasn’t an easy way to travel she felt that it was incredibly rewarding. I told her about my idea but that I was also a little timid about actually doing it. She recommended I get a cheap tent for the adventure and to just go.

A few weeks before that night on the balcony, I met really cool girl from Montpellier. I told her that I was planning on spending some time traveling around France after my two months were done in the hostel and she kindly invited to show me a good time on Montpellier. Since I already intended on visiting a host family I had stayed with two years before in the north of France, it turned out I had the perfect beginning and end for a long, strange trip from the north to the south. The idea grew over time and gradually became ‘the thing’ I was going to do.

About a month later in early September, I arrived in Paris around 5:20 a.m. on an overnight bus from Amsterdam. I had done two and a half weeks or so of backpacking between my last day at the hostel and when I arrived. I spent three days in Paris mostly making sandwiches at some of my favorite sites and I met some good people in the hostel I stayed at the second night too (the first hostel was not so good). Shout out to Mads Jacobsen giving us some tunes in the common area that night. He is also one of the few people I’ve run into who could out-freestyle me. I had been making up my itinerary almost day by day up until then and while looking at a map of the area surrounding Paris, I decided Amiens would be my next destination and the start of my hitchhiking journey. This was because I had done a lot of reading on the subject and read some people say that hitching out of a busy city can be difficult. The night before I left, I luckily received an answer from a couch surfing host, covering my lodging. Then the following day I stopped at a Decathlon and bought a 20€ tent, an extra long sleeve sweater, and a water bottle. I went to the train station, bought a ticket for later that afternoon, ate lunch and then I was on my way. There was no turning back now…