Vroom, vroom

Ok, I am back in Norway after two days of insane driving from Aniane. I left that city just before 9am Monday and promptly hit a traffic jam into Montpellier. Argh. After getting on the motorway, I had a little experience that made me almost question my decicion to leave, and at least partially restored my faith in the future of the human race:

I stopped at a gas station to load up on goodies, and when I came to the counter to pay, I said a resounding "morning" in answer to the chirpy "bonjour" they always feed you. Usually the French will go into lock down mode when I greet them in English - they keep speaking French, or they lose all ability to talk and just point at the numbers on the screen. But not this young frog! She can't have been more than 18, but she actually grinned, and said "Do you need a bag with that, Monseiur?"... and followed up with "here is your change" and when I left, she grinned even wider and uttered that most American of phrases... "Have a nice day". She seemed so cheerful and proud to be speaking English I could have cried.

A few miles further up the road, somewhere after Nimes, I stopped and picked up two hitchhikers; two Belgian girls heading back to Brussels after a theater festival in some town which has temporarily escaped my mind. One of them spoke some English, and we had a jolly good time talking and playing music for hours. They drove with me all the way to Luxembourg, where "every Belgian stops to fill up with cheap gas", and they could hitch a ride for the final leg of the trip. As I left they were loading their stuff into the trunk of a Belgian car, so I guess they made it back safe and sound.

After Luxembourg the directions became ever more confusing so I decided to just trust my map, which amounted to almost the same thing, I later discovered. I spent the night in an overpriced hotel along the A 1, somewhere between Cologne and Dortmund.

Tuesday I va-va-vroomed my way up Germany, picking up a Latvian couple and deposing them at the airport in Hamburg. The rest of the ride was relatively uneventful - the long trek up western Sweden was, as usual, a long dark teatime of the soul. I came home at 1am this morning. Now I am going to go over my finances and see if I have the money to do anything more than just exist for the next three weeks... there's also about two weeks of Italy stuff to blog, wheeee! Keep watching this space!

The last farewell... me and some of the staff at the Cafe d'Esplanade in Aniane, where I took most of my dinners. Nice people all, but they spoke maybe 20 words of English between them.


This is a little lighthouse on the tiny island of Sprogø, between the two bridges of the Danish Storebæltsforbindelsen. I've always wanted to live here.




Elvis is alive, at least according to this German spedition company.