The thin line between giving up, and luck

We had a difficult start that day, because first we had to walk a few kilometers to get back to the main road. Once we found the main road, we had to look for a place  where we could put the sign up. Quickly someone pulled over. We kindly asked him to take us to a better location to find a ride for the long distance. He decided to drop us off at one of the biggest shopping-centers of the area. Literally thousands of cars we coming and leaving every hour. We thought we found our hitchhike pilgrimage. Happy as we were, we started putting the plate up in the air. We expected to be gone there within half an hour. Again and again we were wrong about Sweden, a thousand cars every hour, no one to pick us up. We had to wait a staggering 4 hours, before we could get a ride. At one moment we were done with hitchhiking, Helene wanted to go home. I did not agree on that and proposed we would just take the train to Stockholm instead. We were so glad just to get out of there! Unfortunately the driver could only take us to a town nearby. At that moment we decided to take the train. First we had the idea just to take the train to Stockholm. However, Helene found back her passion for the hitchhiking and we decided to take the train for a few kilometer to a larger town. We wanted to try it one more time the next day, we did not want to give up just yet!

At the larger town we decided to sleep in the city park. We were very tired, because we almost waited all day in the heat of the sun. That night there was a festival going on in the town.We were too tired to go there. A lot of noise disturbed us from our night rest. Besides that, I putted the tent on a bunch of tree roots, a hard ground. All in all the next morning we did not wake up that nicely. To wake up properly, we took a shower on the kids playground. It was pretty cold, and definitely woke us up!

This was it, today would determine whether we still could make it to Stockholm by hitchhiking. The first hours did not pay off, nobody stopped and we got many weird looks from cars passing by. We spent one hour walking besides a highway, but it did not bring any result. We decided to walk back to town and to take the train to Stockholm. We did not care anymore about the cars and the people driving them. We were making funny hitchhike pictures, with a plate serial killers. On that moment a guy pulled over, and he said we could come with him to Mariestad. That is about 130 km in the direction of Stockholm. In the next hours we found more drivers. From giving up one moment, the other moment we were making a lot of kilometers by hitchhiking.

We were getting closer and closer to Stockholm. At a gas station we met a nice couple that could take us to Stockholm, because they live there. They were camping too and were driving with a large ladder behind the car. We spent two days with them and we saw the true beauty of Sweden. The second day driving with them they told us that they have an apartment in the citycentre, which was free to use. We accepted the offer. We found free accommodation in Stockholm! This is what people call luck. These days taught us that by not giving up, you will get lucky at one point!