The day began quite shitty. Usually it’s very easy to hitchhike from Hamburg to Berlin, there is a “street roundabout” from which one exit directly is the beginning of the motorway A24 to Berlin. Something like 50 cars pass by there every minute and they have a great opportunity to stop for hitchers, so it usually takes not longer than 10 minutes to get a ride. This morning I was standing at that spot as well and after 5 minutes the police showed up to tell me that it’s illegal to stand there because it’s officially already the motorway (they told me nothing new). I was told to move into the front of another entrance of the roundabout at a busstop which is a totally disaster to stop for cars and to hitchhike. The police drove by again frequently (don’t know what their mission was today) so there was no way to go back to the good spot. After almost two hours of waiting at the worse spot I gave up and went back to the bus stop to go to another good spot in Hamburg, the service station Hamburg-Stillhorn, even if it’s a construction side at the moment. The first person I asked gave me a lift to a service station close to Rostock… There I found two persons from Poland which braught me to the german-polish border at Szczecin where it took forever to get the next lift again. ALL, really ALL cars I asked went to Gdansk. It took more than two hours to get into the next car of a helpful person, who was Tomek. Tomek was not just a good deal for me getting through Poland, he was a very funny and intelligent guy as well. He drove almost through all Poland with just small stops and dropped me out in Elk at the next morning at 6.30am. Yes, it takes so long to drive 600km of bumpy polish countryroads. I laid down for some 2,5 hours in a bus stop to relax a little bit before the last 300km, sometimes with hitching in hard hard rain, were covered without any bigger problems in a little bit more than 5 hours. So Hamburg-Vilnius (1400km) took me 27 hours and just seven different drivers. In Vilnius I already was expected from Artures, the boyfriend of Liepa, a girl I know from a music festival at my last visit in Vilnius. He brought me to the house I am invited to feel like at home for the next 3 or 4 days. After a shower Liepa and some more persons showed up and the evening programm started, made up by a free concert in the citycentre and some chilling at the local river with some beers. We had a lot to tell, like it is if you don’t see somebody for two years. The party with very relaxed and cool persons later even moved with us to the flat I’m staying at and continued for some more hours but I went to bed earlier… I was just too tired.

btw: If you want to support hitchhikers in Hamburg to make the good spot at the roundabout “Horner Kreisel” a legal one, please sign this petition: http://horner-kreisel.hitchbase.com/ (the page is not working at the moment, don’t know if it’s just a temporary problem or if they stopped the petition)