Getting out of large cities is the hardest part of hitchhiking, followed closely by getting into them. The first time I ever tried hitchhiking I was 20 years old and was standing on a street in the middle of Auckland, New Zealand holding a sign and looking like an idiot. You can't hitchhike out of the middle of a city.
Fortunately, there are sites like hitchwiki.org that have tips for taking public transport out of cities to good hitching spots - ideally gas stations or rest stops along highways. I made it out of downtown Barcelona by walking from my friends apartment to the metro at 9AM, taking a train to Catalunya station where I changed to the commuter rail and a painfully slow train out of the city. Between those two trains and the one mile walk across a bridge and down a road to the gas station it took me two hours to start really hitching.
I stood by the exit onto the highway with a sign saying Madrid. Signs are really only necessary when the road splits toward different directions and routes like it does outside Barcelona. After about 30 minutes a firefighter picked me up in his beat up car. He was in his mid-thirties, wore shades and some scruff. I had to practice my extremely rusty Spanish since he spoke no English, but I think we had a good conversation about the Coen brothers, Javier Bardem, the forest fires along the Barcelona-Madrid railway, his friends' craft-brewed beer, and Catalonian pop music.
He dropped me off after about 85 kilometers outside of the town he lived in. It was 12:35PM. In another 15 minutes, a couple in a small BMW coupe pulled up. I started to explain I was headed toward Madrid in ugly Spanish, but the dude just replied in very good English, "Where are you going?" They were an Argentinian couple from Chile in Spain on holiday. They'd just done a loop from Madrid via Lisbon, small cities in Spain, and Barcelona and were heading back to Madrid after a night in Zaragoza. They left me at a gas station outside of Zaragoza.
It wasn't a great place to hitch, though all the elements were there. It had a gas station, restaurant and store. It had lots of traffic, but it was not a good set-up. Usually, once you get onto a highway, it's easy to get rides from rest stop to rest stop, if not a ride directly to where you want to go. This place wasn't a pull-off/pull-on style rest stop like most places along a highway, it was along an exit, so cars coming off and going back on after a break had to drive further away from the highway before turning around and zooming back onto the road. By the time they were heading toward the highway, they were driving at full speed. This is not a good situation to try to catch a ride in.
It took me a bit to decide where to stand and wait, and eventually stood around across the street from where cars exited the highway for an hour as trucks and cars zoomed past me to get back on. Some cops stopped a truck and were inspecting it when I decided to go into the restaurant for some food to not push my luck. I haven't had any problems with cops since I've been hitching and I don't want to start.
I waited for another hour after lunch. First, one car stopped and the guy said he was only going into Zaragoza which didn't do me any good. I took the fact that he at least stopped as a good sign, and it was. Ten minutes later a large Audi stopped. There were four guys around my age in it, not leaving a lot of room for me. I wouldnt've stopped in their situation to be honest, but I wasn't about to complain about sitting bitch in the backseat.
They were cousins, three from Germany, one from Austria. The driver and eldest cousin, named Ken, drove like a fucking madman, making rapid use of all six gears in the Audi. To his constant frustration, there was construction along the road, limiting the length of stretches on which he could push the car up to 120 MPH. I talked mostly with Mal, the Austrian who was interested in politics and economics, and I really didn't have much to say to him on those topics, though I tried my hardest.
They were your typical party tourists: generally speaking, assholes that made jokes even I considered immature. One of the cousins got so drunk that he passed out on a beach on Ibiza and got everything stolen off of him and had to get a new passport. They were sincerely nice to me though, perhaps their German-ness making them empathize with a hitchhiker. After a rest stop where I snapped the above picture of an idyllic and colorful countryside, they insisted I sit up in the front seat and gave me ice cream and pretzel sticks.
A couple hours later, we were in the heart of Madrid. Ken was off to see his daughter, and they parked right near the Puerto del Sol, where I had coincidentally planned on staying anyway. But before we got there, he managed to sexually harass three women before we even got out of the car: first, a primped-up chick in a convertible he called "silicona" in order to get directions from her (to be fair, she was completely ignoring his polite and clearly audible 'hola's and 'perdon's. Second, a woman was filming something for the news on a grassy median as we were stopped in traffic. Ken shouted out "show me your ass!" in Spanish as we drove past, and later on when we were winding through small streets in the heart of town, we overheard a tourist saying in English, "...I don't know where he went..." and he blurted out, "To suck a cocks!" before speeding off again.
I was checking into a hostel around 8PM, leaving me time to clean up, walk through el Retiro to check out the badass statue of Satan as he falls from heaven, and then get a bus ticket for the next day, for a change of pace. That makes for 11 total hours of travel, including 2 to get out of Barcelona, about 3 for waiting for rides. That leaves 6 hours on the road, just about dead on with GoogleMaps' estimate for the 624 kilometer trip. I was lucky to get brought straight into the city. Usually, I wind up taking public transport in from some outer point, but I guess this time I just lucked out.
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