I
am a student, and therefore have very little money. This
means I
don't have a car, and, wherever possible, don't use the bus. During my
latter school days, when I might get a whole
morning
free before my first lesson, I would occasionally miss the early
morning bus and cycle the 7 miles to get some
extra time in bed. This worked fine, and I employed similar
tactics in the recent summer holidays, when I was working in a cheese
factory from 6am.
A little harder to roll out of the hammock for than a 2
o'clock
lesson, but still preferable to getting up even earlier for a bus.
There is, however, a better way. During my gap year I
pioneered
my hitch-hiking career. I passed my driving test, but I
couldn't
use the family car every day, so half the time I was obliged to get a
bus. Or thumb a lift. It wasn't until my brother
Robin came back from school with two return ferry tickets for Ireland
(given to him free as an incentive not to miss lessons - kids these
days...) that my hitching career started to go international.
Here's a brief outline of our hitch-hiking holiday:
In July of 2006 myself and one of my housemates from Uni, Colin,
attempted to hitch-hike to Scotland. The trip was insprired
partly due to my rose-tinted eloquencies about the above trip and
further brief forays into hitching (such as hitching down through the
lakes summer '05 with Robin while the family had the broken down van
towed home and came back for us in the car a few days later).
An
added incentive was a mission trip we were both preparing for to
Montenegro,
happening in August '06. We decided to collect
sponsorship for our adventure, which more or less constrained us to
using hitch-hiking as our sole means of transport on the journey.
Read all about it here:
By the summer of 2008 I had sufficiently
recovered from
these experiences to feel up to writing a poem about my jaunt to
Scotland, carried out concurrently with Robin's hitch-hike through
Europe. What it lacks in complete accuracy it makes up for by
rhyming (more or less): When Brothers
Hitchhike
