Attleborough, Norfolk (County). Day 62. Step—not Leap—of Faith (The Failures of Hitchhiking)
The two main coordinators of Jailbreak stood on the top of the square at UEA, Rory and Joe. Below, 19 teams with blue “Cancer Research UK” T-shirts and buckets stood at the ready.
4…
I thought to myself that I was lucky my Fridays end at 11am for class, allowing me to attend Romanticism and discuss one of my favourite poems, Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (a thing about British punctuation: they do single-quotes to quote, and a quote within a quote bears double-quote marks. Makes more sense, doesn’t it?) and I got a taste of the sublime, Burke’s demand for terror or fear in such an experience, Charlotte Smith’s odd passive version of the sublime, and Wordsworth’s ecstasy of joy in recasting himself via memory of the woods around Tintern Abbey, a place in Wales by the way.
3…
I looked at Dan. We had called a taxi, since we could spend up to ten pounds to get out of Norwich, but we had no idea what our big plan was. He wanted to stop at a petrol (gas) station and hitchhike from there. I said sure. 2…
Here it comes.
1…Go!
Teams scrambled to the taxis and we were off. Jailbreak 2012 had begun!
The taxi driver called his company to explain the charity cause, since we were getting as far away from Norwich without spending any money, which is the school challenge (hence ‘Jailbreak’). He got us out of Norwich for free. Unfortunately, we had never guessed taxis would be so generous. One group had got a taxi to take them to Stansted Airport upon prearrangement. We were foolish—so caught up in contacting big train and plane companies, we failed to think of taxis.
The petrol station idea lasted about ten minutes and at that point we were told to leave for health and safety reasons. In a sense, it was a bit dangerous with all the trucks and cars driving up, but still, that was a major blow.
I just thought we should walk and we did. We made it two miles and stopped for lunch, which consisted of Jen’s sandwiches. It turned out disheartening in our attempts to hitchhike. I made a sign industriously and Dan held the bucket and used his thumb. Then I joined him with the sign.
There is something about a summary of a situation that can never account for the tedium of time we waited, the small ounce of hope we felt when one truck driver waved amidst a sea of blank faces driving past, the rustling of leaves as more than a simple detail but a movement of a hundred leaves to give warning of the chilling wind that tried our patience and our skin.
Finally we moved on, walking without fear or worry or anxiety—but with discouragement. We still smiled, I held up the notebook-ed sign with both hands above my head, and did this for every car and truck that drove past. This has gotta be one of the worst ways to travel, hitchhiking. And retrospectively, having no girls with us seems to be a disadvantage. Two guys and a girl could appear more trustworthy than two guys alone, but that’s speculation.
We made it further on to a brick shelter near the road and soon a bus came—and the driver ushered us in. We were at an unmarked bus stop, apart from the shelter. We thanked him and he informed us of the farthest point of his route, a little outside a town called Attleborough. He also contributed to the charity bucket.
We walked about two miles and stopped at an area where cars could pull over to the side of the road. I’m afraid to say that we tried hitchhiking for up to two hours around here, entirely unsuccessfully. One funny thing did occur, though: there was a wired enclosure of bulls by us. In about five minutes of standing where we were, I looked behind and saw all the bulls lined up against the fence. ’So if they stampede us, do we run?’ Dan; ‘Yes, yes, we run.’
The brown bulls had a staring match with me, but I neglected to continue it. Luckily, our disinterest in them rendered them disinterested in us, since they congregated back to the other end of the fence. We moved on further and then had to call quits and head into the nearest town: Attleborough.
At this point, we did another foolish thing: we decided to try to walk to a city (called Diss) seven miles away. It was mainly foolish because we were misled by a sign. There were two ‘New Buckenham’ roads: we took the one that brought us straight back on a loop to Attleborough. The walk took us two hours. I passed the time reading over Shelley poems for my essay—reciting them at one point and I then realized why poetry was so popular in the old days and on the roads. There isn’t an excess of entertainment by any means and poetry lets you vent and feel the pleasure of metre, of rhythm, in step with your journey.
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| Bed and Breakfast Heaven |
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| My pen-and-ink sign |
We made one last hitchhiking effort at the turn of twilight to dusk, ending up getting a ride with a good fellow…halfway to Diss. Yep, to the intended New Buckenham. But then, stranded in darkness, we had to call a taxi (yes, breaking the rule of the Jailbreak challenge—for the sake of surviving) and call it a night in Attleborough.
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| These stone markers occurred in and around Attleborough |
Cameras are more useful than tourist or professional picture-taking: I had taken a picture of a Bed and Breakfast phone number and we were able to book it while being stranded. After a greasy diner experience, we headed over to it and were surprised out how much it was like a home. The lady in charge ran it with her husband and her dog. Upstairs, we found two beds, a television, nice bathroom, and biscuits (thick cookies, in my American view) for us. We passed the evening watching ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and a bit of ‘Transfomers 2’. We were asleep by 11.
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