Jamie’s Travels

It’s been a while since my last travelling update. Since then I’ve had a few different trips. in October I went to Aberystwyth for a friends birthday and then last weekend I went to London. But these didn’t feel worth writing about – unlike my hitchhiking adventure.

The trip started at 6am. My alarm didn’t go off so I ran to the students union as quick as I could. After the big group photo of the 200 participants and general meeting with my friends. Me, Lawrence and Maddie in one group – Khumo, Kitty and Tristan in the other. We hitched the tram to Meadowhall (I’m still convinced ‘hitching’ public transit is just a cute way to say fare dodge – even if you are let on my the conductor).

We waited by the side of the road with another 50 people for about 2 hours. We walked all over the area trying to find a spot that someone else wasn’t already hitching from. Eventually we did and after about half an hour of waving a truck drivers and being flipped off someone finally came and gave us a lift. Simon took us as far as the nearest service station on the M1. We asked what he was doing and where he was going and he told us he was unemployed and was just driving around in his new car for fun. We had other ideas about what his real job might have been but that’s just speculation (it was a nice car though).

Very quickly a woman asked us what we were doing at the services. Turns out she was heading to Bristol and was willing to give us a lift as soon as her car finished charging (I was very excited by the prospect of an electric car). As it turned out it was a Tesla – which despite recent developments with Twitter, I still think are rather cool. Tara was very nice and chatty, although she did miss the service station we were meant to go to. The one we ended up at instead was far less lucrative for catching a ride into Cardiff.

Just outside Bristol you would think would be great for going to Cardiff – but everyone there was going the other direction. We spoke to many people, including one old man who told us of how great he thought what we were doing was and how he thought it was a shame that people didn’t hitchhike anymore.

Eventually a nice welsh man from the valley took us into Wales. He took us as far as Newport and then dropped us at a roundabout – he guaranteed we would get picked up from there in less than 10 minutes… An hour later it got dark and we hitched a bus to the train station.

Once we arrived in Cardiff we headed to our hostel and reunited with our other friends in a different team. They had managed to get the whole way to Cardiff from Birmingham by a kind flat Earther. They were very smug that they had won and didn’t have to resort to public transit.

We met another guy that had hitched and he came with us to the dinner before he left to find his other friends in Cardiff. We had a few drinks and went to the after party which proved tiring. By the time I got home it was about half one and I slept like a baby.

In the morning we went for breakfast to celebrate Tristan’s birthday and then had a look around Cardiff Castle. Then we got our coach back to get home. All in all a very successful trip.