Day 33 – North Italy

As we initially planned to leave yesterday, Calvin was upset that we wouldn’t see the the market that is set up outside his flat once a week. His dreams came true with us staying an extra night and we all took a walk through the stalls and had a nosey at yet another Italian market. Overnight, we had decided to hitchhike – just like Calvin and his flatmates do in Europe – as it was the best option probably, a good experience and ticks another thing off our list.

The first thing we needed to do was to get outside the city boundary and to a gas station. Calvin’s flatmate and I had joked about the Lord of the Rings a few times and when we were about to leave, he played the movie music and gave us his permanent marker as a parting gift, so that we would need it in times of trouble. It was a fitting end to such a good time in Italy.

Cologne Nord is the furthest station north of Milan and we needed to walk through a field in order to get to the gas station by the motorway. None of that proved to be difficult as the fence was ripped down and I knew the way after Calvin showed me on his laptop. The difficult part came when we had to wait and ask people if they would take us to Verona, Innsbruck or Munich – anywhere in that direction really. My girlfriend was in charge of holding the sign for passers by whereas I talked to everyone that passed me: “mi scusi signore, parla l’inglese?”.

It took 30 minutes before someone agreed to take us and his name was Marco. He was ridiculously nice and the CEO of a bio-gas company. He could only take us to Brescia as he was going to a meeting but he gave us his number and told us to ring him if we couldn’t move on to Verona from there, and he would take us. He also told us that his mother had an empty house in Lake Garda that we could stay in if we were stuck.

Luckily after 10 minutes, someone else had agreed to take us further on again. We thought that it would be difficult this time because there was another hitchhiker trying the same as us. Thankfully I have more charm than him and managed to get a Steel engineer from Treviso to take us. He was a mad driver and was showing me photos on his phone of his apartment on the beach in Venice. It did look lovely but I had to remind him a couple of times to keep an eye on the road with lorries going into our lane or cars stopping in front of us. Although we could have crashed 4 times, he took us well out of his way to a gas station north of Verona.

There was no point in leaving us on the wrong side of Verona he said so we were now in between Verona and Innsbruck after only a few hours. It was going well so far and we decided to have lunch in the gas station before hitchhiking again. I couldn’t decide what to have until my girlfriend pointed out a nice looking sandwich that looked like chicken with some sauce. She was wrong and it was actually tuna. I hate tuna. It was too late as they had toasted it and everything. I hate warm tuna even more! Being the man I am, I ate most of it anyway as it did cost €5 for such a small sandwich, and didn’t actually be sick. It did help confirm my hatred for tuna though.

Plenty of people passed us and a lot of them were only going to the industry park off the next turn. Two Canadian ladies talked to us and asked us what we were doing and were all for it, but then said they were too scared incase we overpowered and hurt them… a young girl our age, who looked like she was going home from university had told us he would take us in the way into the shop, but as she came out she had to tell us she couldn’t. Her mother obviously gave out to her because she was livid with her and said our bags were to big to fit in the car.

It was nearly 2 and a half hours with no luck so I did what any other person under the age of 25 would do and google my problem. Apparently ‘stranded backpackers’ was already a well searched phrase, only more in the category of porn and nothing to do with transport and tourism. That was no help. We made a decision to give up and be happy with how far we got but it was getting late and we would need to get somewhere to stay tonight.

My maps showed that there was a water park down from the station but the only way to get there was over a fence, walk down the hill and follow the road under the motorway. My plan was to maybe get a public bus back into Verona. Whilst eyeing up the fence to climb, all the lorry drivers that were parked beside it saw us, and all of them had moved seats so that they could watch us potentially make a fool of ourselves. I didn’t really want to end up on youtube or some other social media equivalent so we went around to the side and found a good place to climb.

We actually climbed it without any problems and I only wished that we climbed front of the lorry drivers now, just to see their smiles fade away. At the water park, my girlfriend was dying to go in but thankfully a man helped us with the direction of the bus stop so we had to leave. We walked down under the motorway again and saw two bus stops. Reading the timetable, the bus wouldn’t be for another 2 hours so we thought we might try one last hitchhike back into Verona.

Sitting at the bus stop, I had perfected our Verona sign whilst my girlfriend checked the road signs to see if we were on the right road. When she returned and told me we needed to move to the other side of the roundabout, a man stopped his car in the middle of the road and told us to get in, laughing at the fact that we were on the wrong road. He was on the phone the whole journey and left us off at San ambrosia train station for us to get a train into Verona.

At the train station when we arrived, my girlfriend waited in McDonalds with our bags whilst I went to the ticket office and found out if there was anything we could do to get an overnight train. The girl was really nice and I returned to my girlfriend, who was a state. When I was away, apparently several African-Americans had come up to her and asked if they could sit down and talk to her. Finding out she was from Ireland and a boyfriend to come back any minute, they all left. Then one of them returned in an Irish rugby top – what are the chances… – but thankfully I came back and they caused no more danger to her.

We got a bus into Verona and wanted to find a restaurant with plug sockets. As usual, I found a very posh one that had good food, decent prices and could charge my phone. Although we didn’t get the memo for the dress code, and the fact that we had two very large bags on our backs, they let us eat here and we were able to book a hotel for the night. I even had gnocchi, the ‘homemade noodles’ from our dinner in Budapest, and it tasted much better now that we knew they weren’t going to be noodles. After dinner, we asked how we could get to the hotel and at one point there were 7 or 8 waiters all debating how we should get there, what bus to take and what bus stop to go to. The manager had even got involved and we were getting looks from the other customers for holding the whole restaruant up.

Finally they came to a decision and we followed their directions. The bus stop wasn’t that clear and we couldn’t find it at first, but when we asked a police officer who showed us it, he also eluded to the possibility of getting a taxi. We asked, but it was much cheaper to get the bus. However, we couldn’t find a ticket machine so had to board the bus with no ticket. We got off the bus a couple of stops early, just incase we missed our stop or we got caught without a ticket and we walked up to the hotel.

The hotel was outside the city and in a quiet, but a slightly scary neighbourhood. The hotel itself was lovely inside and we instantly went to bed after a tough day of travelling. We fell asleep to the Iggy Azalea mixtape on MTV and we were just so happy to have somewhere to sleep, after probably the most spontaneous day of my life!