This was my first time hitching anywhere, and I must admit that I was kinda nervous. As it turns out, I had no reason to be. I only had to wait about 5 minutes for a ride, during which I got a lot of funny looks and tons of pointing.. haven't people ever seen a hitchhiker before?, and to my surprise I got picked up by a guy in a porsche!.. I think.. I'm not that good with cars. He worked with heating and air and was headed to the states on holiday in a couple weeks. I asked which city, and he listed just about every big city in the US. If my chosen profession doesn't work out, I'm seriously considering going into heating and air in the UK.. there seems to be a lot of money in it. Anyway, I told him all about what I was doing and gave him the link to my blog, and he was kind enough to drop me off at the ferry port in Portsmouth even though it was a little out of his way (if you're reading this thanks for the ride!). Again the people with Jailbreak said it would be easy to hitch rides on a ferry because they charge by car and not by person, so I figured all I needed to do was find someone who's car wasn't full and ask if I could be counted as a passenger in their car. This was easier said than done.
First off, I went inside to check the times and prices of all the ferries. Ferries to Caen and Cherbourg left relatively frequently through Britany Ferry, however these were about 45 pounds. I asked the attendant if there was anyway I could just get a free ticket since I was hitching for a charity, and she said they sometimes do that but I would have had to arrange that before traveling... oh well, just thought I'd ask. She then told me that if I wanted to hitch across, it was actually illegal to hitch inside the port and only 2 passengers were included with each car. So not only was I going to have to figure out how to hitch a ride on the ferry without actually being in the port, I was going to have to find someone traveling across alone. This seemed extremely hard so I decided I would just ask people for money instead. There was a late ferry that left at 11:00pm with LD lines that was only 25 pounds which seemed like a doable amount especially since I had all day. I then set out for the city center and started asking people on the street for money and explaining my situation. I raised a grand total of 3.45 pounds after almost three house of hard work. At this point I was exhausted having not slept the night before and having to carry around my heavy backpack. I ended up taking an hour nap on one of the couches in the city museum (which was pretty lame but free) and stopped by Charles Dicken's birthplace on my way back to port.
At the ferry port, I went ahead and bought a ticket for the night ferry and met some other charity hitchhikers from Swansea named Will and Flo who were on the same ferry as me and hitching to Morocco! Since we had some time to kill, we headed to a pub for a few hours. I'm going to take this time to recommend a drink that I think all three of us fell in love with.. Fireball cinnamon whiskey with apple juice. It's like Christmas in a cup.. just try it. We left the pub and decided to explore the town a bit; however, none of us wanted to carry our backpacks far. Luckily we found a trolley (shopping carts for you Americans) right outside the pub! All embarrassment aside we piled our backpacks inside and headed down to the waterfront shopping center and watched the sunset.
Back at the ferry port we met up with a bunch of other students from their university also heading to Morocco. We all boarded the ferry and settled in for a long ride, 8 hours total which would put us in France at approximately 8:00am local time. So I had been backpacking for less that 24 hours and I had already shattered my goal of not spending any money; perhaps it was a little ambitious.
