I got into Norway maybe a week and a half ago. It’s remarkable: the further I travel, the more I forget about the things happenning to me. I feel like I become sort of insensitive. Especially when hitchhiking, you have to entertain your driver most of the time, and thinking of the last rides I took on the way to Tromsø, I have reached a point where I don’t even know what I was talking about with my drivers.

Anyway, it happens that I am now hosted at someone’s in the countryside of the Tromsø Kommune and I can use one of their (the guy has a lot) computers to type this and do some administration. I’ll try to recap the path that took me here, more for me since if I don’t I’ll probably forget more than I can actually remember now.

I believe I left Geneva the 25th ; I was going to a village in the Ain countryside to get a SIM card with a data plan—I shipped it here since the swiss mobile plans are so expensive. Hitchhiking to the village – around an hour from Geneva. Less than a hundred kilometers – took me around 4 hours. I wasn’t annoyed by that—it was the remoteness of the place that was at fault. At least, it’s what I usually tell myself. I then hitchhiked to a big petrol station on the main road leaving Bourg-En-Bresse where I just went to sleep in the bushes. The next day someone picked me up here and we left to Mulhouse. So far, so good, I’m on the most direct way to Scandinavia.

Things get a little bit out of the way here. While the service station I was at looked like the perfect spot, no one picked me up for quite sometime. I accepted a ride to Strasbourg and here someone took me to Luxembourg—you know, the country where everyone goes for cheap fuel before a long distance ride. Arriving there I was able to dumpster dive some sandwiches from a trash compactor behind the station. Almost fell in it. Dumpster diving in Total stations is the worst, so before that my daily nutriments almost always came from baguettes and coffees offered by the station employees or truckers.

Well, I had to spend the night there, after being told by a prostitute that I’m stealing her clients by trying to hitchhike the truckdrivers. (Later on I saw the same prostitute entering with a trucker through the emergency exit I was first thinking of sleeping at. It was obviously full of trucker’s shit so that thought didn’t last more than a second though and I slept in a field far from the station.)

It took me more than half of the next day of hitchhiking before I finally left my hopes of going into Germany and accept a ride going to Bruxelles. There were no more than two (two!) people going to Liège before that. At Bruxelle, I found someone going to Antwerp, and here, someone to Amsterdam. I stopped in Amsterdam and hung around for the evening trying to find a place to sleep.

Afterwards some other stuff happened, I got to an island named Texel in the Nederlands, spend some days there under the endless rain and managed to hitchhike from this island to Malmö in one day with the help from a benevolent truckdriver that was going to leave is job after three weeks through Europe. Trucking, you like it or you don’t. I wouldn’t. Best of luck for this guy when he’ll be back in Poland.

I Malmö everything became even more slow, so my mental health suffered from another wave of downs (hitchhiking really comes with a lot of ups and downs, sometime on the same day). I only got to Goteborg in one full day, but the next day in found someone going straight to Oslo where I stopped for a day (what did I say about ups and downs?)

Then, after using an HospEx network for the first time in my life and sleeping at a super duper appartement in downtown Oslo (without forgetting the nice guy that it came along), I left to Trondheim.

From this point, more stuff happenned but I’m getting kind of lazy, and I think the narrative I’m giving here is pretty boring so far. Am I a bad writer or not so many interesting things happenned? Likely, a little bit of both with the foremost being the dominant one. Interestingly, I seem to have found my comfort zone when hitchhiking, and even during the slowest day in Norway, with no one even looking at you, I still managed to feel just fine. I now try to hitchhike 2-3 days (that’s around 700 km minimum) and stop 2-3 days in a place where I’m hosted.

Maybe I need to find a writing objective of some sort? Is the goal to write a funny story, a interesting one about the crazy travels of Mashi on the way to Norway, to rant about my internal debates or to autobiographically show everyone how much of a fantastic person I am? Should it be a long story or a short one? Who do I want to read this blog? Well, don’t leave me yet. I hope to solve this soon enough. Meanwhile, the gibberish prose will frantically (twice a year?) continue.