Day 1: The hitch begins - Birmingham to Brussels

Well, we set off from home at around 7am with no solid plans and no accommodation booked, and 2 days to hitch hike from Birmingham to Cologne for the next world cup England match. All we took was some cardboard and a bag each with some clothes, a sleeping bag and a sheet of tarpaulin.

The plan was to get a bus to New Street then a train to the NEC. However, we got picked up before the bus turned up and dropped off near the junction to the M1. Here, after Ben won the argument over where to hitch from, we were stood next to a roundabout for hours wondering how the hell we were gonna get out of Birmingham. Eventually, I got fed up and went over to the slip road where I originally wanted to stand... and lo and behold... I got us a lift within minutes! Somehow, in our attempt to travel South towards Dover, we ended up North, just outside of Nottingham... and started to realise that if we didn't get a good lift soon we were gonna miss our ferry!
Anyway, several lifts later some bloke missed his shopping trip to Mothercare with his wife to go out of his way and dropped us off at a service station near the M25. After pestering half the people parked at the car park we stumbled across a Spanish bloke in a van who was also going to Dover.

After all our panicking, we actually managed to get on an earlier ferry to Calais (where we were originally planning to sleep) but we hitched a lift with a family to Brussels!

Day 1: The hitch begins - Birmingham to Brussels

Brussels, Belgium