A most wonderful day

Advanced hitchhiking techniques, as displayed by my esteemed colleague. It's not relevant but amusing.

After five lovely days of sunshine in the UK, the rain finally caught up with us sometime in the night. We were dry and warm, so we closed up the tent and went back to sleep. Come morning, we realized that not only were the ends of our sleeping bags soaked so were  most of our stuff, including our backpacks. The tent works perfectly in dry and wet weather, we simply didn't prepare it properly. It was still raining when we set off to hike for the day, so we decided to warm up a bit inside a buffet restaurant.

When we were a bit drier and not as soaked, we headed out into the rain again to make breakfast under an umbrella (making your own food in a restaurant is considered bad sport).

An Irish woman shared our little respite from the rain, and we struck up conversation. She was really impressed with our journey, and when we told her about traveling with no money, she promptly bought us breakfast and coffee. Both were bottomless, so we stuffed ourselves with a lot of eggs, bacon and sausages. The spot we were hiking from was terrible, so we set out to find a place to dry a bit on the way to the next roundabout. In a church, after chatting with a few people, we were discreetly handed £10 by a Brittish gentleman with Dutch grandkids, and told to get some warm grub.

Two hours later we got our first ride of the day, at 3pm. A lovely couple drove us closer to Scotland, showed us a castle were scenes from Harry Potter was filmed, photos of other castles, then drove out of their way to drop us off in Berwick. We parted ways, they gave us free McDonald's coffee vouchers and £10 each to buy some food.

Instead of hiking onwards to Edinburgh, we went to a nearby farm and asked to sleep the night in their barn. They offered their events venue to us instead, gave us a couple of beers and dried our socks for us.

Our only obligation was to join them for an early morning walk on the beach. And what a beach...

We walked around Berwick's fortifications, which are nearly 600 years old, had coffee with the parents of the farmers, walked with them halfway to where our backpacks were stored and listened to their stories of the town.

We made a "we have cookies" sign, messed around for a bit trying to get a ride and then caught one to Edinburgh. From soaked, miserable and grumpy to dry, well fed and in high spirits in 24 hours.