[Rick Lee]

When I worked at the Bayer factory near Cologne, I had a week off every month and always traveled somewhere straight after my shift ended at 6am. I usually walked to the hwy onramp near the factory and got a ride quickly. I wanted to go to Munich for the week and figured I'd make it by late afternoon, leaving around 6:30am. Geezus, was that the worst trip. Probably took me an hour to get picked up and it was a guy in a van, who first wanted me to help him deliver a few cases of Bibles to a church in Bonn, which was a whopping 30 min. away. So that took an hour and I was barely farther along my route than I could have ridden. I got a few more rides, stuck for an hour near Limburg and, by mid-afternoon, still hadn't gotten as far as Frankfurt. That's when I decided it was time for a train. I even made really good money then and easily could have flown or taken the train, but just figured hitching would be faster and more fun. I ended up grabbing McD at the train station and eating it on the train, got to Munich late that night. Miserable day.

Another time my buddy and I took a train from Berlin to Frankfurt/Oder, grabbed a cab and got out at the bridge that goes into Poland. We walked across and started hitchiking. It was a Sunday and church had just let out. We got a ride immediately all the way to Poznan. Fortunately, our driver told us a lot of stuff we had no idea about that really made our trip to Malbork a lot easier. After that trains were easier, since Poland was so dirt cheap and we couldn't communicate with drivers very well.