So we've completed day 1 of hitch hiking and are now waiting for a ferry in Portsmouth!
Beginning in Cardiff, we cheated slightly by getting my parents to drop us off at a service station on their way home. Once we were there we had to decide what to do. Writing 'Towards Reading' on a whiteboard, wearing our green, charity T-shirts and waiting outside the entrance we were ready to start. After 45 minutes of "sorry, I'm going in the other direction", head shakes and small children pointing and laughing at us, we decided to move.
The exit bit proved to be slightly more successful and after 3 hours of waiting we got a lift to Chevely service station. I didn't get the guy's name but he was a dentist, just graduated from Cardiff University on his way to a job interview in London and so was going straight past our destination.
At Chevely we got lucky and after only 45 minutes got picked up by a nice lorry driver. Zoe and Jon sat on a kind of shelf behind the seats, whilst I got a real chair and proceeded to fall asleep. I worry that i wont be much good at keeping conversation going on these journeys! Thanks to our lorry driver friend, our earlier worries of not getting to Portsmouth in time for the ferry were forgotten and we had 4 hours to spare before boarding.
Zoe had rang up earlier and got us half price "charity rate" ferry tickets, so it wasn't too much of a sting to cross the channel. We sat and played cards, met some more hitchers and got served by incompetent staff in the port (stay away from the bar there).
The ferry is due to leave any minute now and tomorrow morning we'll be in Le Havre, bright and early, ready for another day of hitching!