Casa Robino

Summer 2010 is over, but the memory of it is still so vivid, that this Christmas, Denise and I could not resist, and decided to make a little experiment: hitching from Amsterdam to Italy, passing through her mum's place in Saxony, and Austria. And since it's on the way, we crammed in Czech Republic as well.It already sounded like a very bad idea. Especially because we left with freezing temperatures, lots of snow, motorway queues, and except Vienna, we had not arranged any place to stay along the road. In fact, the first day (Sunday 19th) we didn't even have the guts to leave, and preferred to wait one more day and see what would happen. You never know how these Sundays are - there might be a lot of traffic towards your destination, but rather consisting of happy families with full cars that never saw a hitchhiker before. And that was the case, unfortunately, of not only Monday 20th, but of most of our trip.Leaving Amsterdam was as hard as it was on that hot summer day I left it for Portugal. We walked at a decent time (around 9 a.m.) to the official Liftplaats Prins Bernhardplein, close to Amstel Station. In case you never tried it, you should know that nearly anywhere in A'dam is a better place than that one. I know, it looks so nice, with all that place to pull over with your car, and the sign with the thumb. But maybe next time the city administration should ask some real hitchhikers or check Hitchwiki for the right place... Anyway, this time there was a lot of snow, and since nobody knows that that is a place where people are supposed to pick up hitchhikers, they didn't clear the snow from the lane where cars can normally stop. We tried for an hour or so with a sign A1 - Duitsland, and then moved to the gas station further on the way. After freezing a little more and jogging around the gas station to warm up, we got a ride to a gas station in Amstelfort. From there, a Swiss guy saw our sign while we were having breakfast, and invited us into his car, bound for Hengelo. In the early afternoon, we were near the border. A long way to go, since we were not going straight to Berlin, but only until Magdeburg, because from there we had to reach Leipzig and Denise's mum place, Oschatz.After too much time, I spotted a German car with a B plate, = Berlin. The driver was exactly my type: hippyish, long hair and beard, 30-something, probably a hitchhiker himself in the old days, and driving alone. He was in the back of the gas station, so thank Goodness I found him, cause I knew he was our ride. And he was, and we soon set off towards the Hauptstadt.George was not German, although he had a German car: he was a Yugoslavian kid who came to Holland in his teens, and recently moved to Berlin to work on some "projects", i.e. he rented old buildings and turned them into multifunctional spaces where people made art during the day and danced and got wasted at night (or something like that). Cool. He really was our ride. He also almost bought us dinner, but I couldn't even look at that food, so we had some peanuts instead. Unlike him, we were happy even if there were monstrous queues on the motorway (A'dam-Berlin is the most trafficked motorway portion in Europe), some even 30km long, because at least we were warm in the car with him! He wasn't in a hurry, so he left us at Magdeburg train station at around 9 p.m., from where we continued with a local train, and arrived in Oschatz at 1:30 in the night (!).After 3 days in Oschatz, we slowly had to move forward to Italy. We weren't sure which was the best way, whether via Munich or Czech, given that we had planned to visit some macrobiotic friends in Vienna anyway. So eventually at the last minute we decided to go through Czech, although we didn't know any Czech and the motorway Berlin-Munich is very easy (and fast). But first we had to go to Leipzig to finish some things, and ended up starting hitchhiking at 2 p.m. towards Prague. Still very much possible, if it weren't for that guy that wanted to bring us to a "better spot", and we ended up in the middle of nowhere at a gas station used only by people going shopping to the nearby mall. Shit. It got dark, and we were still there, freezing. I wanted to give up. We went to a bus stop, where we found out that we had to wait ages for the bus. Then suddenly, a young fellow that had seen our sign before, collected us from the bus stop and brought us to probably the nicest gas station I've seen for a long time: full of couches where people where relaxing without having to buy anything at the bistro or shop! Our driver had just come back after 6 months in the army in Afghanistan. Amazing stories told in just a few minutes. We had a break and drank tea out of our thermos flask. It was pitch dark outside, but good traffic. I am mostly very selective while asking people, and it happened again that a guy that we didn't ask invited us into his car, direction Dresden. The guy was indeed a bit weird and drove like in a videogame: 160 km/h with such a fog that you couldn't see half a metre from your nose. We didn't talk during all the time we sat in the car, over an hour. When I got off, I thought I had got white hair or even bold... but we were there, and in a few minutes, I asked in my broken hitchhikers' Czech that I had learned in the summer, for a ride to Prague. We very soon got one, and the guy (that played great music) drove us directly into Wenceslas Square, in the very middle of Prague (although he was not going into the city). It was 10 p.m., and we couldn't believe that we were there, when at around 4 p.m. we had almost frozen to death and wanted to give up! We had no idea what to do in Prague, only that we wanted to reach Vienna and our friends ASAP. But we had to celebrate. So we found a pub and had a great beer. Then we took the last metro to the outskirts (Chodov, to be precise), from where we were going to hitch to Brno in the morning. I felt something, that we would have found something there. Well, originally the idea was to find a pub that was open all night and stay inside there until the early hours, drinking or pretending to drink. But apparently there was nothing in the surroundings. We found some cardboard and tried to lie down somewhere, but the cold was very bitter. After some time in one spot close to the metro station, we decided to try something very daring: We went into the ATM room of a bank, one of those cabins where you need a card to get through the sliding doors. Of course there was a security camera inside, but let them come, we thought, if they come, then we move, but otherwise we stay here. And that was the winning strategy. The room was warm enough (it was heated!), and the floor was obviously neither wet nor cold. There was almost nobody around, and even those that walked past, didn't care too much about us.So we survived in there until 6-7 in the morning, sleeping or something like that. And we set off to our hitching spot towards Brno. Hitching is great in Czech Republic, and also in the summer I never had problems with the language (people spoke excellent English or German). We indeed found a ride to Brno very soon, with a nice German-speakinh Slovak lady driving home for Christmas (it was the 24th). Because of a misunderstanding, she left us basically in the middle of the highway, but we soon found out that there was a big mall, TESCO and a gas station very close. We walked there, had food and a long break. We got there at 10:30 in the morning or so, so we were more than confident that we would have found a ride to Vienna before nightfall. But that didn't happen. It was very frustrating. Somehow the place didn't feel so right, although I checked later on Hitchwiki, and that was exactly the right spot, recommended by other users. Nobody helped us get further to the next gas station on the way, so after wasting the whole day trying the impossible, we took a train to Vienna, that was only 130km away. It was very expensive (600kr, 25€), at least for Czech standards and our budget, but we were very tired and cold from the day before.Nevertheless, we spent a very nice Christmas in Vienna. The next day (25th), our friends drove us directly to a gas station on the way to Graz, where we got stuck for a while, until a nice lady drove us a bit further South, until the point the road splits into two, close to Wiener Neustadt. It soon became clear that Austria is not a good place for hitchhikers, that gas stations are too often on the wrong side of the road, and that for this reason most of the people are always going in the wrong direction. Or at least this is what they told us, since nobody wanted to give us a lift. Until we decided to go with the flow. Since everyone was going to Semmering, we decided to go there, just to get out of that place. I was really afraid that it was a bad idea, that we would get even more stuck than before. Luckily, the gas station was very good, although of course it was on the wrong side of the road (it was in the middle of a crossing, so cars could go in 4 different directions from there). The cold was really biting. And unique case of all gas stations I've ever seen, there was a heated smoking room inside (or at least something like that, since it was also used by the staff members as a garderobe)! The room was equipped with all things that someone who lives on the road can ever need: a table and bench to eat his lunch box, ashtrays, slot machines with naked ladies, and a TV showing several movies with Bud Spencer & co. Later in the day, it got less crowded, and we settled down in there, as we couldn't find any rides. Denise lay down on the bench and slept for something like 8 hours without pause. I have no idea how she did. I myself read a whole book till the end, wrote letters, and could not get any sleep in there.This is how we spent the night, until the morning of December, 26th. I started to get very pissed at Austria. Everyone we talked to seemed to be bothered by us, and almost nobody showed any sympathy for us. I never ever had this feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the morning we tried a bit more, and then left that horrible place (that however had saved us from freezing) and walked to the train station. We had no idea about Austrian train tickets and passes, and there was little info around. So we got from the vending machine an Einfach Raus Ticket. Sounds good, let's get the hell out of here. At 3 p.m. we reached Villach, at the border with Italy. I didn't want to hitchhike anymore. I hadn't slept at all during the night, and I was pissed off at all those people. But I couldn't find any train going to Tarvisio or anywhere in that direction from Villach that day. Wtf? Even the bus to Udine/Venezia was not going that day. This was one of those signs, about whose existence I found out last summer (see my previous post)! It could only mean that we had to hitchhike to Italy, whether we wanted it or not. And we had to want it very badly, if we didn't want to get stuck again there.There weren't even any buses or trams to the south of the city that afternoon, so we followed the signs and walked. We showed our sign Italia to everyone. But I saw many Italian cars carrying visibly uninterested people. I thought about how many people said that hitchhiking in Italy sucks. I hope they are wrong, at least up here, I thought. And an Austrian car with a visibly Southern guy inside pulled over, and gave us a great ride until Padua, from where we took a cheap train. And we reached my parents' house just in time for dinner.And this was how we spent this Christmas...