I stuck the car back into its parking space behind the house and rang my next-door neighbor's doorbell. Unfortunately, she wasn't there, and it was starting to look like I was going to have to walk. That wouldn't have been such a bad thing (nice and warm here today), but it's a good 20-minute walk, and I had 5 minutes to make it to the meeting. So as I trotted down the street, I decided to flag down the first car I saw and throw myself on the driver's mercy. I wound up catching a soldier in a pickup truck. I asked him if he would mind driving me to my daughter's school without raping me and leaving me for dead in a gutter somewhere. He was agreeable to my terms, so off we went. I made it to my meeting, unraped and undead (but not in a zombie way), with seconds to spare.
The meeting was pretty much what I had expected: "Wow, what a great kid! So smart and so polite! Truly a pleasure to have in class! A testament to your superior parenting." OK, maybe not that last part, but the rest is all verbatim.
I left the school and began my trudge towards home when . . . you guessed it . . . it started to rain. Lo and behold, a car pulled up beside me, and the driver (this time a woman a little younger than me) rolled down her window and offered me a ride. Today seems to be my day to depend on the kindness of strangers, so I gratefully accepted and arrived home just before the sky truly opened up.
This was my first time hitchhiking . . . since 1987. I had gone to London from Germany with my friend Sarah. Sarah was planning on heading north to Scotland, and I was eager to get back to the continent, where my Eurailpass would be valid. We were sitting in the lobby of the youth hostel, listening to this Danish guy named Klaus talk about his plans for hitchhiking back to Denmark the next day. I said, "Wow, that sounds like fun," and the next thing I knew, he was asking me to join him.
I was hesitant. After all, my mother always said I shouldn't hitchhike. But she never specifically said I shouldn't hitchhike from one country to another with a really cute guy I had known less than 24 hours, so I decided to go for it.
We set out bright and early the next morning. We bought tickets on the ferry from Dover and then stuck out our thumbs once we hit the other side. That first night we got picked up by 2 British soldiers on their way back to their base in Dortmund, Germany. They smuggled us onto the base and let us sleep on wooden cots in the brig. We spent the second night in sleeping bags under the stairs at the port, waiting for the ferry to Denmark. Once we made it to Denmark, we bought tickets on a local train to Copenhagen, because frankly we were exhausted, and hitching was starting to lose some of its appeal.
It was a marvelous adventure though! We met so many interesting people. Besides the British soldiers, I specifically recall getting picked up by what looked to me like punk rockers who were driving a funky car called a Duck. We also got picked up by a trucker and by an older German gentleman in a BMW sedan. I struggled along making conversation in my limited German. I asked him what he did for a living, but I had the hardest time figuring out his answer. Somehow in 2 years of college German I had never learned the phrase for "importer and exporter of bull semen."
I stayed in Denmark for a couple of days with Klaus (who was a perfect gentleman, so get yer minds out of the gutter) before taking the train home to Freiburg and onward to Switzerland. I went into my scrapbook a little while ago looking for pictures from my hitchhiking adventure, but all that I could find--besides a postcard featuring the top sights of Copenhagen--was a little strip of pictures that Klaus and I took in a photo booth in the train station:
Klaus . . . what a great Dane!
No comments:
Post a Comment