I waited just
twenty minutes for my next driver but this time he took me just a couple of
kilometres up the road. He dropped me at a toll station, which I figured could
be a good place to hitch from due to the slow moving traffic I was trying to
hail down. Five hours later I began to review this belief. I spoke to several
drivers but all seemed to be heading back towards Spain and not Bordeaux, my
next destination.
I trudged back to
the town centre of Biarritz and bought a train ticket to the aforementioned
French city, sleeping all the way.
Once in Bordeaux I
managed to access free wifi at the train station and checked out what hitchwiki
had to say regarding a good location to hitch from. I made my way there and got picked up
by a guy en route. He dropped me outside an amazing bakery.
There I had mixed
fortunes. Great food but I waited two hours in drizzling rain. To add to my chagrin,
plenty of people pulled over, only to dash both into the bakery and my hopes too.
When I was
eventually picked up I was taken 15kms into the direction of Lyon, the
destination that at this stage I hoped to reach by sundown (excuse the cowboy terminology).
Sadly, I was, naively on my part, dumped on the hard shoulder of the highway.
Just seconds later it began to rain… incessantly.
Luckily the
downpour lasted less than ten minutes and I managed to find a toll station once
more. I never thought the sight of these road payment stations would be so welcome.
I waited less than
five minutes for my next lift. An eccentric lady in her early 60s, who had half
of Kew Gardens in the back of her car, managed to make enough room for me to
squeeze in beside her (steady).
What was
pleasantly surprising was her standard of English - extremely high. And she
took me almost 60 kms to the next set of toll booths so I was starting to make
some headwind with just over 48 hours until kick off in Warsaw.
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