The Road Is Long

Those twelve hilly miles between my caravan and Machynlleth, the nearest town, have been weighing on my mind. How best to traverse them? The need does arise fairly often - to visit the market to stock up on fruit and veg; to use the internet and post to this blog; to make some essential purchase for my work here; or simply to meet up with new friends who happen to live there. I try to combine some or all of these activities on each trip but still, at least once a week I haul myself over to the ancient Welsh capital.

My shiny red automobile might seem to be the obvious choice. It can whisk me in in twenty minutes, at a time entirely of my choosing, and repeat the trick in reverse. It can be filled with all sorts of goodies that I might purchase there. There is always a free parking spot somewhere. I even have a trailer now to tow stuff that won't fit in the Jimny. The downside is that the manufacturer decided to make it run on petrol, a fossil fuel (a dependency from which I am trying gradually to wean myself off) and this particular little 4x4 guzzles through the juice like it's going out of style making each return trip cost over £6, by my reckoning.

The bus service around here is something of an unfunny joke, nevertheless I have made use of it on Saturdays when there are more than just two a day. The handy extra bus service on Wednesday mornings for the market was scrapped, so to get to the market by bus I would be forced to catch the 08:08 there (I'm normally just putting the kettle on at this time) and hang around all day for the 15:37 back. A return ticket costs £3.30, so it's half the price of driving there and almost as fast (not taking into account the one mile cycle to the bus stop and then chaining up the bike).

I have twice cycled all the way to Machynlleth and back, and may well do it again when I'm feeling up for a challenge. With a fair wind I can do it in just over an hour, but the first time it took me almost ninety minutes. Thankfully there is a quiet B road on the other side of the Dovey river that goes all the way so there's no traffic clipping past at 60mph, but it's slightly less direct and has its fair share of steep ups and downs. On the plus side, it's free, I can choose when to go, and it keeps me fit; on the flip side, it's slow (or I'm slow) and to put it bluntly, it's knackering. And the idea of carrying all my shopping on my back does not appeal in the slightest.

Taxis are out of the price range of an unwaged labourer like myself. Don't even suggest walking.

So I was hunting for another way, ideally one that was free, quick and comfortable. And then it came to me - hitch-hiking! Despite being a convert to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at a young and impressionable age, I came late to actual hitchhiking, it being not until my thirty-sixth year that I first stuck out a thumb on a road. In fact I didn't even get to do that as I was with a friend of the female gender who, as I was scrabbling around writing the destination on some card, just flagged a van down in twenty seconds flat and we were off. So this Wednesday morning it was really my very first thumbs-out that began to try to persuade a driver to take me to Mach.

Fifteen minutes passed and lots of cars, and I began to wonder if my hirsute appearance might be putting them off. But then one kind soul stopped and in I jumped. It turned out he was from the nearby village and on his way to Aberystwyth to teach Welsh to the Welsh Assembly staff (no joke). We got chatting about this and that and by the end of the journey he had offered me a chance to play electric guitar in a soul band he's setting up. Is this what normally happens? Maybe not but it's a pretty encouraging start. The return journey required just five minutes wait, an older chap from the same village who had lived there all his life. He was also friendly and I learned during our conversation that there's a monthly farmer's market in that village - a pearl of local knowledge that may prove very useful.

There you have it - hitchhiking beats all other forms of transport. Not only is it zero-cost, fast, easy on the muscles and burns no more fossil fuel than would have happened anyway, you also make friends with locals and get asked to play in bands.

P.S. Having said all that, the reason I didn't post this on Saturday was because I couldn't manage to hitch a lift in to town, giving up after 45 minutes standing in the heat. Maybe hitch-hiking isn't all I've cracked it up to be.