Without a Traceroute

…in a van that’s nearly as old as I am.

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This trip was pretty ridiculous. We actually wound up leaving around 4 am, not 2 am. I was exhausted but also sort of nervous, so I didn’t really sleep for a long time. The van was rickety and rattly like crazy, but it never died, so I gave it credit for that. We did stop every few hours to give the van time to rest. In the afternoon of the first day, we stopped in like a cowfield in rural France and slept there. Later, we picked up a French girl who was hitchhiking by herself. She had guts; I’m not sure I would’ve taken a ride from us.

We talked about hitchhiking, she said she’d done a lot with a friend of hers, but this was the first time she’d hitched alone. I told her I’d heard it was difficult to hitch in Spain; she said, “Not when you are two girls. We have never waited for more than 10 minutes.”

It was actually a cool trip and we got to see a lot of the French countryside. Apparently the main French highways are incredibly expensive toll roads, so we stayed on the “national” routes, which are basically the equivalent of the famous “Blue highways” U.S. routes. You can make pretty good time, but they go through little towns and villages so you see a lot more. We also took a detour to avoid paying the toll for the highest road bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct, which is too bad because it would’ve been really awesome to drive across and see clouds below the car.

Anyway, here’s some photos: