To Frankfurt and Valencia

This is not one of the promised blog posts to come.

Our plan had been to leave Magdeburg on Wednesday, May 26th to hitchhike to Frankfurt. We stayed Tuesday night so that Stina could go to choir practice. She's awesome at singing, by the way. ;)

But Wednesday rolled around and Stina wasn't feeling well. So we hopped on the ol' interwebs to find out what our options were. We decided we could take a Sachsen-Anhalt/Thuringen ticket (28€ for up to 5 people) to Gerstungen and then a Hessen ticket (31€ for up to 5 people) to the Hahn airport about 120 km from Frankfurt (Ryanair's hub). In theory, we'd then use mifahrgelegenheit.de to find 3 other travelers, and we'd wind up paying 12€ per person. Not bad, considering that the bus from Frankfurt to Hahn is 12€ per person alone. We'd spend the night in either the airport or the forest outside the airport. We weren't positive this would work. We couldn't be sure we'd find anyone to share the price of the tickets, but that was the least of our worries. The real problem was that, while there's information on the Hessenticket online, it doesn't show up when we use the train route planner. Also, the bus to the airport (which is the only way to get there) seemed like it might be another one of Ryanair's schemes to make money (I'm not saying it is, just that I couldn't tell if it was part of the national transportation network or a more private company that wouldn't recognize the Hessenticket).

Anyways, the whole point is moot. We found someone else's Mitfahrgelegenheit. It cost more than the ideal circumstance of our travel, but less than the probable outcome. So we left Thursday morning with this fellow, and arrived early Thursday afternoon in Frankfurt. It was still several hours until Angelika got off work (our CS host), so we ate some carrot-lentil mush, and found a park to read in. We met up with Angelika no problem. Made some dinner, went out for tea, and slept. The next morning we took this kinda expensive bus to Hahn, hung around for our flight (during which time I saw more Americans than I've seen in the past 9 months, including one reading a Magic novel), and flew to Valencia.

Here the airport is in the city. So we simply took the subway (1€ for a rechargeable card, 1,90€ per person for an AB ticket) to Christiane's flat. Since getting here, we have:

grown to hate my flip-flops

spent a total of about 10 hours on the beach so far

eaten many plates of tapas

gotten ice cream at regular intervals

gotten lost and seen a rat *this big*

visited a museum celebrating the 32nd America's Cup (which I now know is a sailing race)

stabbed my ring finger with an orange tree branch

seen the purplest flowers and agéd tiled buildings

learned "una carafa clara, por favor"

relaxed with Buffy and Smallville

buried me in the sand

and hung out on a balcony looking over the rooftops of the city.

Stina has managed most days to write her 2000 words. We've started doing sit-ups on the beach. And we never get out of bed before 11AM.

Tomorrow we start hitchhiking to Faro, Portugal. Press your thumbs for us!

Bullet Point 1 Filled Out

* Ride from New Orleans to Jackson, MS from roofer who'd just gotten out of jail for a traffic violation and was on his way home for Thanksgiving.

We waited until Tuesday to leave because we thought we might have a ride all the way to Carrollton, TX, which is very close to Plano. We’d posted an ad on Craigslist rideshare, and this is part of what I mean by lack of dedication to hitchhiking. We were trying to find an easier way, and we could always try and find easier ways, but that isn’t the point. The point is to get out there and hitchhike, trusting people so that they will trust us back.

The ride fell through, so we set out Tuesday morning. We took the streetcar to the edge of the city and a highway entrance, and then we held out our “Dallas” sign and put out our thumbs. Within five minutes, we had a ride with the roofer. He was going all the way to Jackson, MS, and he thought we might have an easier time getting from there to Dallas. Since it ultimately shaved 150 miles off our journey, we went with him to Jackson.

The roofer had gotten out of jail at 1:45am that same day. He’d been in since Friday night and said it was for a traffic violation, but he also mentioned cussing out the cop. He said the New Orleans jail was one of the worst he’s ever been in, and he’s been in and out of jail and prison since he was 26 years old. I think he said he is 39 now.

He was born and raised in Louisiana, but his parents had moved to Mississippi several years ago, so he goes back and forth between the two states for work and visiting. He’d been hitchhiking just before Thanksgiving one year ago when his current boss picked him up and asked him if he needed a job. He is in between roofing jobs right now. His boss has a cocaine addiction, and sometimes his addiction comes before paying his workers their full wages, so he (the roofer) is thinking about looking for work in Jackson until his roofing boss calls him for another job.

He’s got a girlfriend in MS. He said he met her on a job. She is friends with one of his co-workers and she came by to see her friend, and the roofer was introduced to her. The way he recounted their meeting was matter of fact. She told him she needed a man around. She left but came back another day and he asked her if she really needed a man around and she said heck yeah, she needed a man around. So he went over and they ended up watching a movie together and now she’s got a man around.

He drank two beers over the course of the drive to Jackson. At first this made us wary, never having been in a car with someone who is driving and drinking, but he sipped them very slowly over three hours. He loves his beer. He said he doesn’t mind working hard all day as long as he can have his six-pack afterwards.

It was a very interesting ride. There is a category of people who pick up hitchhikers in order to have someone to talk to on a long ride. A 19 year old girl who gave us a ride from Bellingham to Everett back in September fit this category, and so did this guy, though they live utterly different lifestyles. It took very little prompting on our parts for him to tell us so many details of his life, and it is one of the things I love the most about hitchhiking.