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.
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| This is their house, the one on top |
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| 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.
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