Border Crossings

Alright... ummm so the last few weeks have been a bit crazy.  So I'll start at the beginning.  Leaving the chateau. After almost three months living and working at the castle I decided it was time to move on, you know, got that itch to move (not that kind of itch you sick bastards).  I found a HelpX host down in the southwest of France near the French and Spanish border.

After my first hitchhiking experience I figured I would do it again, just on a much larger scale.  If I was driving myself, with no stops, my route would take 8 hours driving.  So, I decided to play it safe and give myself a few days to get down there.  Holy crap did I underestimate the speed of hitchhiking.  I made it in 12 hours.  Well... actually I could have made it, I stopped for the night in some hills to camp, but I was only about 20 minutes from my destination, Perpignan.  Only thing was, I was two days early.  I have no phone or anything call, I just have to wait till Friday.  So Thursday I walked around in Perpignan, and took a bus to where I was going to be picked up, Arles sur Tech.  Found a campsite, played some french bingo, didn't win, but am now really strong on my french numbers (I didn't always pay too much attention to this in school) and got picked up by my hosts the next morning.

It was a beautiful house in the middle of nowhere in the mountains.

This is their house, the one on top

This is the waterfall on their property.  Great sound to fall asleep too every night.

Unfortunately I seem to not have any pictures of their house.  Shame on me. But it's okay, I wasn't there too long.  My first weekend I decided to head to Barcelona.  I had never been there and always heard it was amazing, but I never really had had the urge to go but since I was two hours away, I said, why not and headed down on a bus.  Sounds easy enough yeah? Nope.

As we are crossing the border, the french police come on board and check everyone's passports and what not.  Well... my passport has a slight problem, I have no entry stamp for the European Union.  It's not my fault, in Paris, when I arrived, customs just glanced at my passport, handed it back and I was in France.  Took all of two seconds.  Well this no stamp thing really mad the police not happy.  They pulled the whole bus over into the a police station, and hauled me off.  The whole trip, for everyone on the bus, was delayed for me.  In the police station they keep telling me I don't have a stamp, I keep saying, yes I know, you didn't give me one.  Then one lady came over and started yelling at me "You have no stamp, You are guilty!"(in english) over and over, she scared me.  They threatened to deport me, and all I did was drop my french level down to very basic and kept saying was I am a tourist, I know nothing, I am sorry, I am leaving Europe soon blah blah blah, basic dumb American tourist (of course if they would have looked closer at my passport and seen all my previous visas, this may not have worked so well, but they didn't and it did). In the end, the supervisor came over and said to all of them sometimes when people come in through Paris, customs doesn't stamp.  It's a fairly common thing, look it up.  Anyway, after a few more minutes playing dumb tourist, they let me go saying it was a 'gift' and 'next time' they would get me.  After about a 15 minute delay, I was back on the bus, gave everyone the thumbs up and we were off to Barcelona with more than a little grumbling about the French Police.

Got to Barcelona, checked into the hostel, walked around.... and the rest is to be continued, for I have a meeting now.

There's sand everywhere!

Ah yes, it's been about six weeks, so I guess it's about time to make another blog post.  Things at the chateau have been going well.  Work has been getting done on the roof, therefore I've been playing around three stories up with no floor, walking on small three inch beams.  It's been fun.  Alas I am parting ways with this place on Wednesday  more about that later though.

This past weekend was a great time.  I finished with work early on Friday due to the fact I had accumulated some extra time the week before, packed up my sleeping bag, tent and backpack and walked out the front door with Jon.  We had one goal in mind; get to the ocean via hitchhiking.  We had never done this before (minus a brief asking for a ride in Colorado one time, but I never stuck my thumb out for that one).

We walked about 4k to the main road and stuck our thumbs out for the first time.  About 20 minutes later a girl stops and picks us up, takes us to the supermarket in the nearby town of Bressuire.  We load up on some food (Bread, Cheese, Pain au Chocalot, Apples, OJ and Chips).  After packing it all up we head out to one of the main roundabouts.  Right when we arrived at the roundabout, without even trying someone pulled over and asked where we were going, it just so happened they were going our direction.  The mom and son took us about 6 kilometers into the next small town and dropped us off.

This is where our luck ran dry for a bit.  We ended up walking for about an hour and a half down a long stretch of road.  I was quite fond of the blackberries that grow on the side of the streets here.  So I was off collecting some blackberries in my hand to eat while Jon had his thumb out.  A french couple stops and asks us where we are going, we said the sea.  As luck would have it, they were going to the sea too, and even cooler, the exact destination we had picked out on a map earlier that day.  What chance!  We ended up at the coastal city, St. Gilles-something-something and were dropped off at the beach.

We proceeded to walk down the beach, away from civilization, turned left into the dunes and headed towards the edge of the forest and set up camp.  Collected some wood and had a nice little campfire.  It was a fantastic night.  Listening to the fire crackling, the waves coming in, hanging out, chatting, couldn't ask for anything better.

The next day though was horrid weather wise.  It rained all day.  We donned our waterproof gear and walked around the city.  We went to the north of the city where there were rocks and searched for a cave to sleep in for the night.  The only caves we could find though were too close to the water, and you could see that the tide rolled into them.  That would probably have not been beneficial, you know, health wise.  With out attempts to find a cave to camp in faltering, we ended up staying in a hotel, because screw putting up a tent in the rain.

The next day we packed up and hitched home.  The rides we got were from:

1. Dude who didn't say one word
2. Dude who was heading south to jump out of a plane 10 times in 5 days
3. Mother and her two kids
4. Guy who shared a bunch of french music with us
5. Female cabinet maker who lived out of her van and was missing a finger
6. Portuguese guy
7. French road worker who drives some incredible number of miles each year
8. Some guy who's french was impossible to understand

Eight rides, made it back to the chateau.  It was a grand adventure.  It was wierd, being rejected over and over again, hundreds of  times even, but in the end, you always got somewhere.  Sometimes after all this rejection you catch a break and go a loooong way.

All  of this was in preparation for my next travels.  Which is happening on Wednesday when I leave the chateau.  I am hitching south to a city an hour outside of Perpignan (right next to the French and Spanish border on the Mediterranean Sea), to my next HelpX host. If one was driving straight through it would take eight hours to get there so I'm leaving early Wednesday morning and hoping to get there sometime on Friday.

Anywhoo, I think I say this every post, but I will try and update more.  Look for an update sometime this weekend documenting my trek south.