Thumbing Around: Robert Prins Writes
of just under 90 km/h. Still I enjoyed it, and the next year, in 1981 I decided to do something a little more ambitious, to hitch-hike up to the Northcape (the northernmost tip of Europe!).
Just before I was about to leave though, I was struck by a bout of acute appendicitis and postponed my attack on Europe's most northerly tourist trap until 1982. It was fortunate in a way, imagine this happening on the road!
I laid a tight schedule, it was my intention to get to the Northcape in twelve days, including a short stay in Oslo, to arrive there on 21 June. In the event I made it! I made Oslo with only a slight delay and once I left Oslo, I managed to reach each of my intended daily destinations without too much trouble, spending the nights in Trondheim, Mo-i-Rana, Narvik and Alta, arriving in the fog covered Northcape on 20 June only to leave again the very next day. On my way back I got stuck in Kautokeino in Norway (some 40 km before the Finnish border) for two days. None of the dozen or so cars to pass in that time bothered to stop! So I caught a bus and continued hitching from Rovaniemi.
Eventually, after stops in Helsinki, Stockholm & Copenhagen I made it back to Germany, where I got a ride just North of the Ruhrgebiet which took a turn for the unexpected.
It was late, I fell asleep and ended up near Munich, which was not really my intention, but then again, I shouldn't have fallen asleep. However, I ended up having a great day pushing buttons in the Deutsche Museum, before trying to get to Paris, where an uncle used to live. I got as far as Strasbourg...
The next day was useless. After a long walk out of Strasbourg, broken by a dip in the Marne-Rhine canal, I managed to get a ride back into Germany. Later that evening, at a German motorway service-station (a.k.a. Raststaette), I was greeted around 11 p.m. by another hitch-hiker with "Ah, die Konkurenz ist noch wach!" (Ah, the competition's still awake!).
During our conversations, he told me that he had left Southern Italy in the early morning, which seemed impossible to me, having rarely if ever hitched so far so fast myself. "What's your secret?" I asked. It turned out to be rather simple: "Ask people for rides when they stop at service stations!"
Eventually, late in the afternoon on the next day he decided that we were not
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