Europe

I’ve been getting pretty sloppy at updating this blog, I figured I should let you all know what I’ve been up to this summer:

At the start of August I left the vineyard I was volunteering at and hitchhiked a few hours northeast to the fifth annual Hitchgathering – which is exactly what it sounds like, a festival for hitchhikers. I first heard about it when I was crashing on the floor of Lisa and Richard’s one room flat just outside the old city center of Chaing Mai. Richard is a programmer involved with projects like hitchwiki and trustroots (staple resources of my trip). Lisa’s boyfriend, Clemens, was about to start hitchhiking from Singapore to the hitchgathering in France, following the same route that I ended up taking through Kazakhstan, Russia, into Europe (although at that time I was hoping to cross the Middle East). I told them I would meet them all in Europe at the gathering in a few months. Which is what I did.

The gathering was some two hundred people camping on the riverside beach of an apple orchard. Each day there would be food missions and groups of two or three of us would hitchhike out to the nearby towns and dumpster food. In the evenings groups would straggle back with bags stuffed full of veggies and stale bread which we’d cook in a big communal pot over an open fire while passing around wine that would mysteriously appear and just as mysteriously vanish.

After a few lazy days of lounging on the beach, swapping stories, and periodically swimming when the August sun got too hot, I grew restless and left to spend the rest of the month WWOOFing at a small, family run brewery in the south of France. I lived with Thomas (the brewer), his wife Amandine, their two year old daughter Lisa, and a Spanish man named Javier who was working at the local fromagerie. They had a big vegetable garden and pigs which would eat the spent grain leftover after sparging the malt. We’d eat the pigs they’d butchered last year nearly every day – pork chops, pâté, sausage cured in the root cellar. Nearly every day some guests would be visiting and the house was always alive with the smell of ratatouille simmering or a freshly baked loaf of bread.

The brewery itself is an old flour mill at the edge of a winding river bounded by a steep gorge. The surrounding area, a national park, is thickly wooded with pine, cypress, and other conifers – a forest I would explore on near daily runs, sometimes venturing up one of the steep paths that leads to the arid plateau above. The view was reward for the effort.

At the start of September I took a rideshare to Caen, stayed the night at a couchsurfer’s apartment, and took a ferry across the English channel the next day.

I landed in Portsmouth, and walked out of town for two hours, parallel to the highway, looking for a suitable place to hitchhike. In the place of shoulders, all the on-ramps instead had metal barricades flush to the fast moving traffic. No room for your friendly hitchhiker, encumbered by a year of unemployment and an unfriendly exchange rate. Frustrated, I walked back into town and bought a train ticket to the next town and overstayed my ticket by a hundred kilometers. I showed up that night in the tiny coastal village of Lee, North Devon. It’s here that I’m writing now and will be spending the last few weeks of my trip.

I’m staying at an old English brewpub called The Grampus Inn. The inn part of the pub is now defunct and only serves to host travelers like myself who work in exchange for their stay – the kitchen, brewing, gardening, cleaning, and generally maintaining the place. Friday night is open mic night where the owner, Bill, is apt to play his fiddle next to a crackling fireplace.

At the start of October I’ll be traveling across the Atlantic aboard the freighter MV Portugal from Liverpool to Philadelphia. It’s a ten day sail, then a few hours on the bus to Ottawa, and I’ll have made it successfully around the world without ever flying. Pretty neat, huh?