Hitchhiking seemed like a good idea the day I realised I didn’t have any money. A few friends and I wanted to visit my housemate in Alderley Edge, just south of Manchester, but having just spent the last of my student loan on various unnecessary activities I could not treat myself to a £35 return ticket. Never one to let reality get in the way of my dreams and aspirations, I suggested we hitchhike.
The plan was simple: the four of us—myself along with my friends Tom, Laura, and Francesca—would find a busy spot next to the A1 in London and hitch a ride up north. Now, being the brutish descendants of cavemen that Tom and I are, we came to the realisation that no trip anywhere is complete without an unnecessary competition. And that’s how we ended up racing, Tom and Francesca versus Laura and me. The first team to get to Alderley Edge would have bragging rights and the honour of spending the most time with my housemate Pete in his suburban dream home.
Before we started, everyone we knew mocked our vision. My parents didn’t think it would be possible and we’d be stranded less than ten miles outside of London, confused by the land beyond the M25. They had no intention of rescuing us. Others thought we’d be flat out murdered by a helpful, yet psychopathic, driver on the way to a meat processing plant. And some were baffled by the very concept of hitchhiking. But like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, the voices of the naysayers only motivated us.
First rule of hitchhiking: find cardboard, but don’t ever pay for it. In reality, the trip up north was remarkably smooth (it went without a hitch, one might say), and we weren’t kidnapped by the Triads. It was around midday on a sunny Saturday. Laura and I stood by the road, about fifty metres from the other team, armed with a piece of cardboard we’d picked up from a bin somewhere that we had covered in hearts, smiley faces, and the word “Leicester,” thinking anyone going north on the A1 would be happy to take us there. It worked. Within only a few minutes, a car pulled over and a man in his late 20s/early 30s let us in, explaining he was on his way to Sheffield and could drop us off somewhere around there.
We were surprised, to say the least. Not only had we hitched a ride before the other team (thereby proving conclusively that we were the more attractive pair), we happened across a driver who would take us quite a bit further than we had hoped. On top of that, the man, Andy, happened to be one of the most interesting people I have talked to in some time.
One fear of hitchhiking is that you’ll be stuck in a car with someone who doesn’t know how to hold a conversation or has absolutely nothing to say. This is especially true for a journey as lengthy as the one from London to Sheffield. It might only take a few hours, but sitting in silence with a stranger, save for the occasional awkward cough and comment about how it sure is beautiful out today, is torture. You would almost rather opt for a talkative psychopath with a meat grinder.
But that wasn’t the case. Our man Andy had led an enviably fascinating life, and we spent the next few hundred miles on the road talking about everything from studying history at uni to exploring Antarctica, both of which he had done. He had been to Afghanistan where he was injured; he spoke a minor language only used in a few villages there; and he once accidentally cut a rabbit in half while working in an oil refinery. The amount of stories he had to tell was astonishing, and I was content to let him keep going.
My admiration for that man kept rising until we reached Chesterfield, and without missing a beat Andy burst out ranting about the town, its people (“That one probably has six toes if you take off his shoes. That one looks normal; he can’t be from around here.”), and its architectural merit (“All they have is a crooked church spire. Everyone in Europe could build normal churches, but Chesterfield is so useless they were only able to build that thing and call it a tourist attraction.”). But despite giving us a crash course in an oddly specific kind of prejudice, we parted ways with nothing but the utmost respect for each other. He dropped us off in the small village of Baslow and pointed us in the direction we had to go. Bakewell, Buxton, Macclesfield, Alderly Edge.
I wouldn’t say we were pessimistic from then on, but considering we were stranded in a time capsule where cars didn’t seem to exist yet and a cafe, a roundabout, and a cemetery seemed to constitute the entire village, Laura and I resigned ourselves to walking toward Bakewell. Bakewell, as it happens, makes Bakewell tarts. I always just assumed they were baked really well. My friends tell me I’m an idiot.
And so we headed on down the road without cars, woods on one side and wide-open green spaces on the other. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a single living soul on the ground (unless you count cows; there were plenty of cows). Meanwhile, Tom called me, happily informing us they’ve arrived and are chilling at Pete’s pad. It had only been four hours since we started. Four hours to get from London to Manchester for free. There wasn’t a single penny spent on tickets, petrol, or £100 fines when you accidentally forget your student railcard at home. I was so impressed I couldn’t stay mad at him.
Luckily, a taxi driver finally saw us and our newly remodeled sign, now displaying the word “Buxton” on top of a bottle of water in a very clever fashion, and put us out of our misery. He took us straight to Bakewell, no questions asked, which made me think we could probably all start getting free taxis if we start holding up cardboard signs. In Bakewell, we stocked up on various local tarts and postcards (anything outside the M25 counts as exotic) before positioning ourselves next to a road, smiles as wide as your mouth is after a particularly competitive game of chubby bunny.
That was possibly the longest wait of the entire journey. Over half an hour had passed as every car and motorcycle drove by. For whatever reason, it was always the motorcyclists who looked the most apologetic. Young drivers in full cars smiled and looked condescending, middle aged drivers in empty cars scowled and looked condescending, everyone in between could not care less. That is, until we came to the conclusion that walking the rest of the 28 miles would get us there faster, and someone took pity on us. A man in his mid-20s saw us, turned around, and took us past Buxton, to the second highest pub in the UK, the Cat and Fiddle just outside Macclesfield.
Naturally, we had to stop for a pint at the Cat and Fiddle because we might have lost the race to Alderley Edge but we weren’t going to lose the race to have the most fun. What we didn’t consider was that the Cat and Fiddle is on top of a hill surrounded by a solid mass of absolutely nothing. There is one road that goes up there, a broken fence somewhere in the distance, and nothing else. The sky is perpetually grey and the ground perpetually brown. And there aren’t any cars that pass by, either.
When it was time to leave, we stood by the road, thumbs out and our faces abounding in exuberance. Unfortunately, the only ones to witness it were the biker gang standing just a few metres away. They loved the spectacle. Something about two people in their early-20s, obviously naïve and full of misguided hope, hitchhiking on a road in the middle of nowhere with only one passing car every two minutes, must have seemed amusing to them.
But like all classic movie villains before them, their cries of mockery were eventually silenced when, from out of nowhere, a little blue VW campervan-that-could chugged up the hill. Inside, an older couple, overcome with pity for my generation, stopped the van and let us on. They were, like every other driver that stopped, inordinately cheerful and welcoming, full of stories and facts. We learned that Macclesfield, the town they were taking us to, was the silk capital of England. We learned about the roads and hills they took us down, which gave way to incredible views of the Peak District.
One thing you learn on your fourth consecutive ride with a stranger in the course of just a few hours is how formulaic conversation starters are. Everyone uses them; I know I have my go-to stories and questions and experiences. But it’s very rare that you hear a person go through the same story four times in a day. As great as the story of Laura hitchhiking 3,000 miles in Canada was, I did end up knowing the whole spiel, verbatim, by the end of the day. But, to be fair, she had to hear all my stories four times as well. Maybe we’re just not very imaginative.
The campervan dropped us off in Macclesfield, we walked over to the side of the road, and almost immediately someone stopped to pick us up. It genuinely took about a minute for us to hop from one car to the next. This time, the driver was a very courteous man from Ghana whose life philosophy was that he had to help people whenever he could. He took us straight to Alderley Edge, and with that, our hitchhike was over.
What amazed me was how helpful people really are, even to complete strangers. Some, like the man in Bakewell, went out of their way to take us places they weren’t planning to go. A few drivers mentioned that they picked us up because we both looked like we were decent people, clean and not drug-free. I was flattered. And while it did take us the better part of the day to get to the end, it was undeniably worth it in every way. Tom and Francesca might have gotten there three hours before us, but if they had written this account, all they would have been able to say is, “We got on a car straight to Manchester. It was fun. Hooray for motorways!”
If the thought of spending money ever starts to bore you, definitely take a stab at hitchhiking. It’s best to go with one other person because there will be periods of time where you’ll be doing nothing (although, surprisingly, these aren’t as long as I expected considering our longest wait wasn’t much more than thirty minutes). Also, as our last driver pointed out, many people won’t pick up single people, especially female, because they want to avoid potential trouble. With two people on board, it makes things less suspect for everyone involved. And, of course, make sure to deviate from your plans a little and explore places you weren’t intending to see. I will take the Cat and Fiddle over a motorway any day. By the end, you’ll have bonded with your exit buddy, met a bevy of really friendly people, and seen parts of the country you might not otherwise see.