We were standing at the exit of a service station somewhere in the middle of France. We'd spent the whole day going from petrol station to petrol station, one ride at a time, and it was starting to get dark. The afternoon was bleeding into night and our hopes of finding a car heading to Toulouse were shrinking by the minute.
Getting out of Lyon had been a disaster — it took hours to land the first lift — but after that things had gone reasonably well, except that none of our drivers was covering much ground.
That was when a Renault convertible sports car stopped for us.
Ilze and I looked at each other in surprise, but before we could exchange a word the driver waved us in.
He was a man well into his thirties, executive type, friendly eyes. He was heading to a city beyond Toulouse but had no problem going into the centre to drop us there.
After offering us something to eat, he started telling us how he'd hitchhiked himself back in his younger days. He also admitted he was pretty tired — he'd been driving all day since picking up the rental at Genoa airport — and that he needed to rest but had to reach his destination that night.
His next words were an offer to let me drive the sports car while he had a kip.
— Erm… yeah, sure, why not…
— You do have a licence, right?
— Yes, yes.
— Right then, take it for a bit while I rest.
— OK.
And with that he handed over the wheel. A day that had started with my thumb out on the side of the road in Lyon ended with me parking a sports car right in the centre of Toulouse.
There we met up with an old friend from Couchsurfing who, after hearing that we were hitchhiking from Latvia to Spain, offered us his sofa — well, his inflatable mattress — for a couple of nights before we continued hitching our way to Zaragoza.
