The lightning of the night before had switched the power off so after Linda and I had packed up, we all went into Inverurie for breakfast. We dined at the Gordon Arms Pub: a slap-up breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato, and toast, washed down with delicious coffee.
We said goodbye to Blue and Kerry and caught a bus into Aberdeen and from there another out to the dual carriageway leading to Edinburgh. We made a sign saying “SOUTH” and were soon picked up by a couple of lads in a rented car who sped us southward. The driver, a young Englishman, suggested he take us over to Glasgow and from there we would have no trouble hitching south.
They dropped us off near a road leading down to the M6, and within a few minutes, a truckie picked us up and took us a further 20 miles south. He was from Ayr and had a very broad accent, which we found hard to understand. As we bounced along the highway, I noticed he had a copy of some sort of wank mag on whose back cover there were a host of adult phone numbers: I’ll suck your cock…0898, etc.
He dropped us at an out-of-the-way service area, and for a while, we thought that we could get stuck, but after 20 minutes or so, we were picked up again by a Yorkshireman bound for Skipton in North Yorkshire. He was also a very speedy driver, and the miles passed swiftly as we crossed the beautiful rolling hill country of the borders, with hazy Cumbria on our right and the dark, stormy Yorkshire Dales on our left.
When we were dropped off at a motorway interface near Kendall, a thunderstorm was imminent, so we hurriedly took shelter beneath some trees growing on the embankment beside the A65. No sooner had we crawled in under the thicket, than the first peals of thunder rang out then rain began to pelt down. The trees provided some protection, but soon both ourselves and our packs began to get wet, so we unrolled our roll mats, covered the packs with one and sat under the other.
The storm passed after about half an hour, and we made our way down out of the thicket and began hitching on the slip road leading back onto the M6. Within 10 minutes we were on our way south again, this time with a bloke who had himself hitched from someplace when he was a student in Cumbria. We both dozed as we travelled south through the busy and heavily populated West Midlands, passing by Lancaster and Preston and skirting Manchester. In the smoky evening light, the city looked like a matte painting of some other world made for a science fiction movie.
We were held up in traffic for over an hour south of Manchester and reached Birmingham at around 8pm. We paused at a service station for a meal at Burger King, then made our final stand out on the slip road in the gathering darkness, our sign finally reading, LONDON PLEASE.
Three young punks trying to get to Taunton rudely stood in front of us for a while, but they were soon picked up, giving us a clear shot at all the cars leaving the service area. It was fully dark by now and we were on the verge of calling it quits and forking out 40 quid for a room in the local Granada motel when we were picked up by a couple of Londoners homeward bound.
We slept nearly all the way: one and a half hours down the M40 to Gerrard’s Cross, just outside the M25 in the heart of the Oxfordshire commuter belt. The train station was almost deserted at this time — 11.15pm — the only sound being the loud ticking as the seconds on the digital clock flipped over. We waited for about 20 minutes for the Chiltern Turbo, which sped us rapidly into London. At Marylebone station, we paid only the fare from Wembley, saving about three quid each, and caught the tube to Earls Court.
The Trevoir Hotel was hot and stuffy and decaying, but the stoned woman at the front desk only charged us 10 quid for a shared room on the top floor. We sneaked in, trying not to disturb the young South African who was already in the two-bed room. Linda took the spare bed and I made a nest on the floor beneath one window, which let a little bit of cool air into the stifling attic room.
Before I lay down, I looked out the window across the rooftops of Earls Court at the orange skies of London. We had, in one day, hitchhiked more than 500 miles from Aberdeen to London. It was good to be back.
CurseOfTheTraveller 