The point is, all the flights from Germany to Portugal were too expensive for my taste [or they were with the cheapo airlines, which I despise and try to avoid when possible], and I hate flying, and I like seeing the places I'm traveling in. So I looked on a rideshare website [ridesharing is seen as sketchy by a lot of Americans, but in Germany, it's a common and legitimate concept known as Mitfahrgelegenheit], and lo and behold, someone was driving to Portugal and looking for passengers!
From Dresden, I caught a train to Düsseldorf [in fact, that train ride cost almost as much as, if not more than, the trip from Germany to Portugal - Germany, your trains are too expensive!], where I met up with an older gentleman and a younger hippie-ish fellow, both German expats in Portugal.
I slept most of the time, but I woke up for a little bit in Belgium, which was very exciting, because it was my first time in the country - but we never stopped, so I still have yet to actually touch the ground there. Our driver informed us that Belgium hasn't had a working government for a year now and that trees in some of the forests are so full of shrapnel from World War II that saws can't cut through them.
In France, I noticed that Ikea ads use "vous" [the formal "you"] - but in Germany, they use "du" [the informal "you"]. At a simple roadside rest stop, some of the toilets were squat toilets that I'm more used to seeing in Egypt and Cambodia - I didn't know they really had them in Europe.
And all along the highways in France, this hideous restaurant popped up over and over again:
I used the restroom at one, and the door of the women's bathroom featured a majestic American Indian woman dressed in a Davey Crockett-style buckskin suit holding a lasso. Always interesting to see how a country glamorizes another country's native population - or at least uses them to sell burgers at chain restaurants on the side of the highway.
We only stopped occasionally to funnel gas from a container in the trunk into the car [through a hose going over my seat in the back - I was always worried that something would go wrong and I'd have to sit in a puddle of gas for the rest of the trip] - I think because not many gas stations were open in the middle of the night.
Once when we stopped, I asked what the plan was for the night - whether we were going to start looking for a cheap hotel soon. "Oh, no," was the reply. "We're driving through." And indeed we did. The guys shared driving a little bit [I'm not confident enough with driving stick or generally driving in Europe] and we just kept going.
I woke up in Spain when we stopped at a grocery store to grab some breakfast, and then we didn't stop again until we arrived in Coimbra.
And thus concluded my 26-hour journey across western Europe with two strange men! [I wish I had more adventures and fascinating sights to share, but really, I was drifting in and out of crappy car sleep most of the time - so much for seeing more of the European landscape!]
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