Colin
Thomas and I completed a sponsored Hitch-Hike to
Scotland in July 2006.
The trip was to raise money for a three week mission trip to Montenegro,
taking place in August 2006 with about 8 members of the Warwick
University Christian Union.
Or you can read this account of our adventures (for photos,
click on the hyperlinks):
DAY
1 –
Tuesday 11th
Colin
arrived on Monday 10th July, so we
set off from Brooksby at around 8am on Tuesday 11th.First destination: Melton
Mowbray.It
being a
Tuesday we wanted to catch the
market day rush, and as it happened Colin got us a lift within about 15
minutes
with what turned out to be the only female driver of the journey bar
Christine’s mum.Only
6 miles from my
house, but it’s a start.
Arrived
in Melton before 9 o’clock and headed for Nottingham
road.We hoped to get to Nottingham then cut across to Derby.Three and a half hours later we gave up on this fantastic
plan.Despite
standing at a comfortable lay-by on
one of the busiest roads of the town, nobody stopped for us.We tried everything
– writing John O’ Groats
on our sign, smiling, the works.Eventually gave up and headed for the only other road
heading vaguely
north (west-north-west by west).After
a
mere hour or so, in which Colin dozed and I tried to work out how I
could fake
a photo with our grinning faces either side of a Scotland sign, someone
stopped
for us.A friendly
bloke who had some
history of hitching and picking up hitchers.He was heading for Loughborough, but he took us to a truck
stop just
beyond so we could get onto the motorway.Colin got this lift too (but who’s counting?)By this time it was about
2:15.
We
didn’t learn till later that the insurance for
lorry companies forbids picking up hitchers.After spending the best part of a dismal hour at the truck
stop we tried
the A-roads either side of the motorway roundabout.Finally, at 4:15, I managed to thumb my first
lift, up the M1.True,
it was only one
junction up, and I had to sit among the tools in the back of the van,
but it
was a lift nonetheless.
Our
next lift came a bit more quickly – we were
actually able to stand on the side of the motorway just before the
roundabout
at Junction 24 because there was a tailback for a mile or so.Only ten minutes or so
after dragging out the
old M1 (N) sign a four-by-four
called
across and asked us if we wanted a lift.“We’re only going as far as Rotherham –
you’re probably better off waiting here” was what
the male half of the couple
said, so I thanked him and declined.The
only lift I have ever declined.Fortunately Colin had a slightly better idea of where Rotherham
was, and due to the sluggish nature of the traffic I was able to catch
up and
retract my refusal.That
lift got us a
good 40 miles further up the motorway, during which time they played
Bob Dylan
(much to Colin’s delight) and offered us mints.The first lift I’ve had with someone who had a
passenger.They
were a confusing blend of Scottish and Yorkshire,
but we don’t hold that against them.
From
the services just above
Junction 31 Colin got us
a lift all the way to Leeds.The vehicle was a kind of
mini-minibus, so we
didn’t see much of the driver.So
little, in fact, that the two of us can’t even agree on the
colour of his
skin.He took
another hitcher as well,
who claimed to have been hitching around the country for 12 years,
working at
services and hotels along the way.
Leeds.Ah, Leeds.Here I must point out that our map of
reference was a 20 year old National Trust map.Roads change.The
M1 has since
changed into the M62, the M621 has been created, taking over some of
the old
M62, and the M1 has developed the ability to sneak traffic onto and off
itself
without a visible slip-road.Anyhow,
we
managed to walk around for over an hour looking for a way onto the M62
west.When we got
back to where we
started with nothing to show for it except photographic evidence
of
attack by
the local wildlife we decided to strike out east for one of the nearby
villages
that hits the motorway at the next junction along.How hard can it be to find a motorway in the
middle of a village?Answer:
next to
impossible.Two
hours later we came to a
T-junction with a decidedly quiet b-road, and were on the point of
giving up
when help materialised in the form of a friendly Yorkshire
couple in a Transit van.They
stopped
when they saw our frightened lost faces and explained how to get to the
M62.Back the way
we came for about an
hour.At our
crestfallen expressions
they bundled us into the cab and took us all the way there.This feat of passenger
seat occupation
involved the female half of the duo sitting more or less on the side
window,
while the driver was restricted pretty much to gears 3 and up.
After
waving a friendly goodbye we settled down to
wait in a lay-by just outside
Oulton, already casting about for
somewhere to
sleep as the sun began to sink.It
can’t
have been ten minutes, and barely 20 cars, before Colin bagged us
another lift
– this time with a couple of locals off to Manchester
to sell T-shirts outside The Arena
after a concert.They
picked us up
because “nobody goes to Manchester
from here”.Our
hopes of getting in to Liverpool
by nightfall, squashed out of all likelihood
after our first half day spent within walking distance of my house,
started to
revive.
Dropped
at a services above Manchester
we
were fairly optimistic, but an
hour later, with the sun almost gone, we decided to jack it in for the
night.The flow had
dropped to about 10
cars an hour, and none of them seemed to be paying us any attention.So, since our only
sleeping arrangements
consisted of a sleeping bag apiece, we checked into the hotel for the
night.No, wait
– our budget for the
trip was set at £10 each, so we crawled under the trees a few
yards from the
motorway on one side and an A-road on the other and prayed for a dry
night.
DAY
2 –
Wednesday 12th
Woken
by the sunrise at 4:30, we had a lie in till 6,
and Colin got us our first lift of the day at around 7.In another commercial van, but with enough
passenger seats for us both this time.The bloke, an electrician who commutes from Leeds
every day, took us to Penny Lane,
which was great for those of us who are crazy about the Beatles.
From
Penny
Lane, we asked directions for
Maghull, certain
that we’d be knocking up Christine’s family to
shove toast and cereal into our
starved maws before too long.We
were
told to get a bus into the centre, another bus to the station and a
train to
Maghull.Not a very
promising start,
especially since public transport doesn’t really count as
hitch-hiking in the
purest sense.So we
walked.And walked.Past the
docks, past the Liver building. And eventually
found a bus stop that claimed it could take
us to our
final destination.We
reasoned, partly
with our weary feet and sweat-soaked back-packs, that since we had come
a long
way out of our way to get to Liverpool we could afford a few miles
public
transport usage, since it would be impossible to get a lift out of the
city
centre.After
waiting around at Paradise Street
bus
station we found a little timetable tucked away that told us that there
would
be no buses till 6:04am on Saturday.And
then again at 6:15am.You
wait a week
for a bus and two turn up at once.But
we didn’t really want to do that, so we set off again for a
train station.The
only one we knew of was Lime Street,
but
when we asked for directions we got sent to St James’
underground.They
sent us up the road to Liverpool
Central, which turned out to be a better choice anyhow.£2 each of our precious budget blown on one 6
mile train journey.This
money was
supposed to be used for food, but since we had half a packet of
digestives and
a bit of chocolate we hadn’t found cause to spend any yet.
Christine
met us at the station and walked us back to
her house, where
we breakfasted sumptuously at about 11
o’clock.The
day went by in a haze of food, Rummikub,
cinema (yes, they treated us to a trip to see Pirates of the Caribbean
2), showers and more food.We
met David
from work, spent the evening with David’s family and
Christine’s alternately
and then me and Colin spent the night in a spare room and a hammock in
the
garden respectively.It
was a lovely
night, and still no rain.
DAY
3 –
Thursday 13th
Our
next lift wasn’t quite bona-fide, since Christine
press-ganged her mum into taking us to the M6 (along the quietest
motorway in
the country, the M58).With
our
unsolicited packed lunches we were looking forward to getting all the
way to Scotland
by the
afternoon.Our
theory that mid-mornings
are a bad time to hitch was borne out by the fact that we hung around
by the
motorway at Junction 26
for hours before deciding to try our luck
further
up.I reckon we
walked about 6 miles,
through villages near the motorway, crossing a very inviting canal, before finally
hitting Junction 27.It
was 2 o’clock
before we got our first
proper lift of the day (yes, Colin got this one too, making the score
6-2).Arguably the
newest vehicle we’d been in –
ever.We had to
pull back the plastic of
the seats to get our belts on.It
was
another commercial van, but this time the delivery was of the van
itself.The chap
who picked us up was driving it up
to Ireland,
and possessed a set of trade plates, so he knows what it’s
like to be
hitching.After a
small detour at the
next services to pick up milk he forgot for his tea we were on our way.He took us as far as the Lancaster
services, where we ate our lunches
(I’m sure the tomato wasn’t squashed when it was
packed.Or the pear.Or sarnies…).Colin discovered a
pound coin on the ground, which upped his working budget to
£9 while I was
still on £8.
Not
too long after this I bagged our final lift.Those of you who have been keeping track of
the distances so far may be surprised at that last sentence.Final lift?Either they happened upon someone visiting relatives in Edinburgh
or they utterly failed to get any
further than the lake district.Well,
it
was a bit of both.The
driver, an
ex-Warwick student no less, took us all the way to Carlisle
– a whopping 70 miles.With
a working
knowledge of bad football clubs and English literature to add to his
university
he and Colin had plenty to talk about.This
pulled the score up to 6-3, so pretty much a win for Colin.But we all know that
distance is more
important than number of lifts.Well,
Colin wins that one too fairly conclusively at 189 to 114 miles.OK, how about average
distance? Yes, a clear
win for Anthony with a good solid 38 mile average compared to
Colin’s pitiful
31½ miles.But
then, Colin’s new to this
hitching business, so we weren’t expecting much anyway.
Little
did we realise that, after our fortuitous shunt (here seen driving
off with our silent blessing)
to the northern-most
reaches of our native land, it would be so hard to
hop
over the border.In
our newfound optimism we even stopped at Carlisle's football club shop
to pay homage to some player
or other. A
word of advice to
hitch-hikers: Carlisle
doesn’t like you.We
don’t know why, but it’s true.Unlike Melton Mowbray, however, they aren’t
afraid to express their feelings.Meltonites
may hold you in disdain.They
may even
despise you and your kind, but they won’t go so far as to
swear at you, attempt
a drive-by hat theft or try the old pretend-to-stop-and-speed-away
trick.Carlisleians
have no such scruples.All
of the above and more occurred before we
gave up and started our most epic trudge of the journey.
We
didn’t think at first that we would be walking all
the way.We just
wanted to get out of
the town.Then
maybe go down the road a
bit to find a good spot.Then
the road
started to resemble a motorway (the A74 becomes a motorway 50 miles
earlier
than our map led us to believe), and we abandoned it for lonely
side-roads and
deserted countryside.Words
cannot
adequately describe that journey.Suffice it to say we weren’t quite sure where we
were going, continually
found our path blocked by farms, rivers or just a lack of actual road,
but we
kept going.As
Bilbo would have said,
“Go back? No good at all.Go sideways?
Impossible.Go
forward? Only thing to
do!On we
go.”Eventually
we ran across the Esk,
negotiated
an overfriendly colt
and made our way to the main road to bridge
the
river and
the subsequent railway.We
took a path
beside this road till it branched off to
Gretna,
and we finally stumbled across the
border at 10 o’clock with
the light just
fading and our feet and legs grumbling about the 12 mile trek.We stopped to get some
good shots of the sign, but all we got was this and this (not for the
faint-hearted). By this time we had our
hearts set on haggis
and chips.Not much
of a reward, you
might say, but it’s all we had to hope for, so after a brief
break we staggered
on into the village in search of a chippy.On the way we passed a cash machine, where I won 50p off
Colin as a
result of a bet involving the availability of Scottish money in Scotland.Easiest 50p I ever earned,
but it put us
even in the budget
stakes, with £8.50 each still to spend after reaching our
destination.Even
in Scotland we weren’t left alone to
enjoy ourselves – first we utterly failed to find a chip
shop; the only place
open at the unearthly hour of 10:30 was a Chinese takeaway, where we
squandered
a whopping £6.70 between us.Made a very
welcome evening meal, but even then we weren’t done for the
day.We still had
to find somewhere to sleep.Now
dark, we wandered back through Gretna
looking for somewhere secluded enough to dump our sleeping bags, and
settled on
a big airy bus shelter
just outside a shopping centre on the edge of
town.We set an
alarm for 10 to 6 so as to be up
before the first bus and settled down.Under cover, it could rain all it cared.Apart from a brief hiccup in which I found I had lost my
phone and we
traipsed back across the border to find it, we were all set for a
well-earned
night’s sleep.Alas,
it was not to
be.Not ten minutes
later a security
guard walked round, observing our weary forms from behind the shopping
centre’s
locked gates.He
walked off without a
word, and just when we thought we’d escaped being bothered
the tannoy came on –
“Bing bong! Yer cain’t sleep there”.With nowhere left to go, we headed for the
no-man’s-land between the Welcome
to England and Welcome to Scotland
signs.Colin was
reduced to sleeping on a park
bench, while I was reduced, somewhat further, to sleeping on
the ground
beside
the park bench.Some
welcome.
DAY
4 – Friday
14th
Dropped
off admiring the Scottish stars (which cynics
have suggested are no different to English stars) and woke with the sun
at some
time around 5. We
slept in till about 7
to give the dew time to evaporate off our sleeping bags. Our
mission was complete. Apart from the haggis and
chips. That still
niggled at us, so we took a bus to
Annan, just up the coast, found our much
sought-after local speciality
and
spent a sizeable chunk of the afternoon dozing on the grass in the
shade of
some obscure monument. Could even have been Robert
Burns
- they do seem to be pretty keen on him. We spent some time
looking for the sea, but apart from some derelict
boats
we didn't even come close. We
had had enough
of hitching by this time, so ended up getting a train down from Annan
to
Carlisle. The
station was unmanned, and
nobody came down the train to sell us a ticket, so our most difficult
stint of
the journey on the way up, the walk from Carlisle to Gretna, was
matched by our
easiest stint back from Annan to Carlisle.
From Carlisle, the hub of hitch-hiker hatred, we took
another train down
to Penrith. A brave
attempt to hitch
from there reminded Colin of family friends who lived not too far away,
and the
upshot was a weekend spent with them in
the lakes.
We went down to Dervwent Water where we sat around getting
sunburnt and skimming stones (besides the
exciting discovery of a very realistic Loch
Ness monster).
We even discovered, to Colin's delight, a grammatically
correct '10 items or fewer' sign in a local
supermarket. Eventually we took a very
civilized,
if somewhat delayed, train journey from Penrith back home,. and so the
saga ends.