2023-11-20 17:19:03
Can you still hitchhike in 2023? In this way, editor Maarten van Gestel tries to get as far as possible towards the climate summit in Dubai. Day 1: a wild ride through Germany.
A relaxed, bearded man in his thirties steps out of a camper with a Polish license plate, someone who looks as if he has had a weekend away. Max – or Maksymilian – Grabowski laughs when he sees my cardboard sign saying ‘Dubai’. If I want I can ride as far as Poland. “Have you been on holiday?”, I ask, happy with my first long lift to Ankara. He shakes his head. “No, anything but, but that’s a long story. I’ll tell you along the way.”
My hitchhiking adventure started a few hours earlier from my parents’ house in Boxtel. My father offered to take me to a gas station on the A2, but that still feels a bit like cheating. I say thank you, say goodbye, and step out the door with my backpack. My former fellow villagers probably want to take me along for a while, I think, but that’s not right. At least twenty cars ignore my thumbs up.
Until following half an hour a Saab comes to a stop. “Just get in,” says Jacquot van Puijenbroek (57). He is on his way to work in the Raymakers textile factory in Helmond, and recently heard someone on Radio 1 talking regarding lifts for the climate. When it turns out that person is me, he starts laughing. “I did my good deed of the day.”
Forgot your bag of food
In the two hours that follow, everything goes right and wrong. Van Puijenbroek likes to take a detour to drop me off at a good spot. But the truck stop in Asten turns out to be a bad choice. At 9 a.m. in the morning, all drivers to Eastern Europe are long gone. At the second lift provider I make a mistake: I forget my bag full of food when getting out. Fortunately, he is also very nice, and he comes back to the gas station near Venlo. “You will need that bag on your long journey.”
The Polish camper I then get into – Grabowski takes me to Magdeburg, from where I hitchhike to Leipzig – turns out to have been stolen. Or almost stolen, and now stolen back. “I have a company that rents campers,” he says. This is good business in the high season, but now it is quiet. He was happy when a customer wanted to rent a camper for a month for work in the Netherlands. “He was going to work in construction for a Dutch company. I had a strange feeling regarding him, but he might pay, so I was fine with it.”
But that camper did not return following a month. And that Polish worker never heard from him once more. Grabowski runs the business with his wife and began to worry that he would never see his luxury Fiat once more. He has equipped it with two GPS systems. “But someone who is a little handy can sneak it out.”
Positively disturbed
There was only one thing to do, Grabowski decided on Sunday. With a friend from Toruń to the Netherlands in one night, pick up the camper and return as quickly as possible, without the worker noticing. And so it happened. Grabowski and his friend raced to Venlo, saw the camper in a driveway, jumped in and, relieved, stopped for gas at a gas station, where a boy with a cardboard lift sign was just standing there. “I probably looked so happy,” he explains, “because I’m relieved to have my camper back.”
Why does he also take a hitchhiker with him following that grueling journey? “I thought your sign with Dubai was positively crazy.” And, Grabowski adds: his radio is broken, and he might use some company so he doesn’t fall asleep.
Also read:
Why Trouw is (partly) hitchhiking to the climate summit in Dubai
Would it still be possible in 2023: stand on the road with a thumbs up and hope that you get to Turkey on time? Trouw is hitchhiking to Ankara towards the climate summit. Partly to save CO2 emissions, but mainly with the hope of great encounters.
Is there still hope for old-fashioned hitchhiking? These initiatives want to put it back on the map
Old-fashioned hitchhiking has all but disappeared, but may be making a cautious comeback.
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