30th day - THE END!

After one day of visiting fast Brussels...Hugo took his brother's car to take Liis to the airport...And it all ended as fast as it started =/

THE END!

Summary of the trip:
Lasted: 30 days.

Hitchhiked in 59 cars.

Made 4677km without paying.

Been in: 13 countries & 25 cities.

Used all kind of transports: car, truck, van, caravan, mini-bus, bus, ferry, bicycle, tram, electric, metro & plane.

Slept in: bed, sofa, floor, inflatable mattress, balcony, caravan, abandoned house & squad factory.

Helped by this amazingly beautiful persons in many ways (and any others that we didn't even got to know the name):

Valdemar, Damian, Ola, Igor, Kamil, Raymond, Natalia, Pawel, Leszek, Salome, Ania, Michael, Petr, Alek, Zbyszek, Kolin, Marco, Barbora, Martina, Lucia, Cristaps, Daniela, Eva, Carlos, Mariana, Liao, Clemens, Chino, Adi, Petra, Mirek, Andy, Kat, Ursula, Nusa, Ladi, Ziga, Ivan, Janez, Simon, Mateja, Mojka, Manca, Katarina, Antonia, Plavavesna, Tonca, Totic, Sandra, Denis, Vicent, Igor, Iva, Angie, Tim, Claudia, Maria, Peter, Lota, Lena, Mikolay, Ante, Plamens, Jens, Susana, Gabriela, Arbri, Margarida, Jose, Milka, Tomas, Niko, Gary, Dimitrios, Marya, Tacos, Manuela, George, Panagiotakis, Tano, Angelin, Darko, Lille, Bossa, Rada, Juric, Radmilla, Marcio, Jana, Rita, Frank, Roland, Mari-Liis, Astrid, Marianai, Tom, Marinca, Esita, Nuno, Alina, Karin & Bu.

Portugal & Estonia joined together to one crazy adventure...Now it's ended! But we will always remember this trip as one of the most incredible achievements of our life =D Thanks for the bottom of our hearths to all that were with us in our amazing journey...even if it was only in our minds! Thanks to all the good people that we met that made us believe in human kind all over again! Thanks for all the good moments even if it was just for one quick smile! See you all someday somewhere and somehow =p

29th day

Gent

Today we had an afternoon trip to Gent, close to Brussels. It is a small cute city, but right now they have a huge festival going on for 9 days. We were walking around and there was something to do or see in every corner - dancers, circus, puppet show, malabarism, free concerts, parkour, tap dance, all kind of art expositions and many other things! Amazing! We hope to go back to this festival some day =)

Even the weather was perfect and all the city was filled with good feeling. We celebrated the end of our trip with a champagne (as it was promised long time ago =p) and enjoyed the perfect evening.

Later we come back to Brussels and went to eat the biggest hamburgers we ever seen! They have challenge both for men and women: men have to finish king-size burger (with 1,2 kg of meat) and fries, women the queen-size burger (with 0,7 kg of meat) and fries. And the meals are huge! If a person finishes one, the prize is T-shirt, if two... you could get a free trip to Spain. Liis was not strong enough and finished only half of her hamburger, Hugo survived till the end! Now he has brand-new gorgeous T-shirt (and probably he do not want to eat anything until Christmas) - he was even feeling sick at night xD

Tomorrow we will look around in Brussels and then it is time to say good bye :(

28th day

After hard night of partying (xD) we slept all morning! Had quick brunch and drove to the city to give the bikes back - really cool to drive with our backpacks. For us it was hard to say goodbye to Tim & Angie...they were too great to be true! We really hope to meet them again someday somewhere.

We finally started hitchhiking at 4pm =P It's amazing that, after so many countries with signs saying "forbidden to hitchhike", we saw a place where it's even advertised that people do it. Amsterdam is so open minded and cool that they put a sign saying "hitchhiking spot"! We stayed 2min waiting for a car to stop...so great spot.

And yes! After 650km in this part of Europe we hitchhiked for the last time, used our great sign for the last time and changed city for the last time =( Sad feelings of nostalgia are arriving fast and the trip is suddenly almost ending...Now we stay in Brussels and visit some places around this famous city. We are staying with Hugo's brother Nuno and his wife Alina :) Liis can not wait to hear all the embarrassing stories about Hugo! 

27th day

Today it took us ages to wake up and start moving :) Finally on the afternoon we decided to rent bikes and have a trip outside the city borders. The bikes were kind of hard to drive and there was just too much traffic with bikes - we were not used to it...millions of bikes everywhere xD. They even have ferries for bikes (for free) to cross the river.

Few kilometers outside from the city everything changes to beautiful country-side places with gorgeous houses and true Dutch way of living. We even found a cool place where you could take some berries and just leave the money (they really trust people...amazing), so we ate a lot of them =p

After 5h cycling, Hugo found a Portuguese restaurant! Always good to see your country flag in foreign countries =D. Ended our afternoon with a relaxed barbecue with Tim's family (good meat finally!!!). Even half dead and almost falling asleep...we decided to go to a Jazz party (DJ improvising with a life band). It was something from another world!!! GREAT PARTY that lasted all night long =D Tks a lot Tim for this perfect day! You really know how to host someone...we felt like home =')

26th day

Going to Amsterdam!

It seemed easy to hitchhiking from Cologne to Amsterdam... but it is not! We spent almost all day on the road again, asking and asking and asking... Getting outside the city was already difficult enough, first walking to city center, then S-Bahn and finally one bus (sorry Germany but we didn't pay for public transports there...too expensive =p). Finally we found some couple who agreed to take us outside the town after one hour, which was perfect for us - lunch time. We ended up in a gas station next to Germany-Belgium border, where it was really hard to find someone going to our direction. So we were stuck there for two hours. One nice truck driver felt bad for two homeless travelers and started giving us food: tomatoes, bread, watermelon, almonds and even salt to season the food =D Thank you so much! You kept our spirit up!

Finally one nice Dutch couple saved us and suprised us with another amazing moment on our trip - we were drinking champagne while driving to Neitherlands! Finally it took us 3 cars,  about 9 hours and 300 km to reach Amsterdam. But we did it!

Amsteerrddaaammmm!

We are staying with the cute Dutch couple we met in Split (Tim & Angie). Tim welcomed us with delicious dinner and then we had an interesting tour in Red Lights Street (Hugo's favourite part of the trip) - amazing open minded place. We even rided  a bike back home...better saying: Hugo was riding and Liis chilling in the back =p Much more to explore tomorrow :)

25th day

Cologne

Little bit of sightseeing, having fun and relaxing. First part of the day we were looking around the city, discovering every corner of the famous cathedral, old town, amazing "love bridge" and even had time to get to know local art - Ania...Hugo's sister would love the expositions =D

They are famous for the crazy amazing carnival! So...we found a awesome costume store and of course we tried on lots of cool stuff and had fun with the camera.

This was tiring enough, so we went to a park and slept there for 1,5 hours and enjoyed the sun. Now is time to relax and get ready for the busy time after our trip ends. In the evening we had Yoga lesson with our host Janna. We were both really-really bad, but she was great. We skipped all the jumps etc so we would not destroy her flat... Oh and as perfect ending to the day, 1 beer and sleeping on the balcony looking the clear sky and peaceful life around us (with Angola flag on the flat in front for Hugo's happiness xp).

24th day

Now we can finally say that we hitchhiked from Latvia to Athens! Our main goal is done! =D Now as a special gift for ourselves...we will travel in Germany, Netherlands & Belgium before saying goodbye. For that to happen we took in the morning a flight to Germany (that costed around 40€). In the airport things went better than we expected. Neither of us had a special plastic bag for liquids, but they let us through the security check without problems, Hugo only lost his pocket knife (dangerous and skillful terrorist). We both had to put our big backpacks to Ryanair special bag-box, but after a while of pushing and pulling, we managed to do it! We even passed with bottles of 500mL eye-lents liquid & Hugo's air wax without any problem. It was the smallest airport that we have ever seen...only one flight arriving and one flight leaving (the same plane xD) during all day.

Hitchhiking from Frankfurt-Hahn airport was quite hard, first we walked for a while away from airport, tried to hitchhike on the road and then decided to ask people next to a local Lidl. After struggling for a while, Hugo finally managed to find a man who took us to the main road and after that it was much more easy. Totally 3 cars and 6 hours to arrive to Cologne (or Keulen, Köln, Colônia...depending on the language xp).

The city seems to have really good energy and everybody speaks amazing English and is ready to help you. It's good to be back in central Europe! Today we only walked a bit in the city center and hanged out with our cool host Janna.