South, Please! A Reflection on Race 2: Madrid

What do a carrot farmer, a mushroom magnate, a tiny French beach town, and lots of sangria have in common? They were all staples of my Race 2 Madrid experience. AKA: the time my friend and I willingly begged 18 random strangers to let us get into their vehicles. AKA: the time of my life.

We simply didn’t know what we were in for as we sat on the Racer bus at 6 AM on January 15^th, speeding through the dark to a ‘secret location’ (which turned out to be on the outskirts of Edinburgh). I remember thinking of the whole thing as a giant, blank puzzle – each piece an unknown ride to an unknown destination with an unknown person.  They called our team number and chucked us off the bus at a Total station, leaving us with our backpacks, bright yellow T-shirts, and a giant foam thumb as our only props to help us travel over 1,500 miles to Cat’s Hostel in Madrid. After about 45 minutes of hitchhiking trial-and-error, we triumphantly piled into a southbound car with a sweet lady called Paula. The first puzzle piece slid into place.

The biggest thing I learned while hitchhiking was probably that you learn a lot while hitchhiking. We learned more about carrots than most people would ever hope to know, thanks to our carrot farmer friend Ben, who, mid-ride, took us to his carrot field just outside of Leeds to inspect his crop as heavy winds battered the area. Our friend Martyna educated us on her life as a major figure in the French mushroom production industry—a very selective position, which, as I understood, she was headhunted for. We discovered an exact, miniature replica of the Statue of Liberty, standing over the beach in beautiful Soulac-Sur-Mer and looking out across the sea towards its New York relative. Sitting down to dinner in a tiny restaurant in Bordeaux, we found out that truffle season is currently upon us (which we thoroughly enjoyed). And from our last drivers—two young Spanish women headed from Burgos directly to the center of Madrid—we gathered information about the city’s best neighborhoods for going out and its most worthwhile sights.

Our 1,500 miles also took us right past the scene of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, and through the breathtaking mountains of Basque country. We figured out where on the street to stand to most easily get rides, and learned how to say the word ‘South’ in a variety of different languages. We memorized highway names and numbers, and used signs and common sounds to communicate with a Romanian truck driver who spoke absolutely no English.

We realized that the average stranger is kind, caring, and quite willing to go out of his or her way to help two kids on a crazy adventure for charity.

When we finally arrived in Madrid after 4 days on the road, we found ourselves with a lot of two things: Sangria (which was amazingly cheap and came in cups the size of buckets) and people to text with the good news that we’d arrived—a collection of characters from Glasgow to San Sebastian who had left us their numbers and business cards and made us promise to tell them when we had safely found our way to the hostel. When we sent out a mass message, each one of them replied, thrilled at our success and happy to have played a role in our journey.

I don’t think they’ll easily forget the day they picked up a team of disheveled Uni students, headed to Madrid in a massive charity competition. I know that we definitely won’t forget them… thanks, in part, to a long list we made on my phone of each driver, their defining features, and an anecdote or two. Eighteen lifts is a lot to remember.