it seemed as harmless as any of our other stupid ideas (you know…”lets hold a rock festival in Joanna’s mam’s field”, “let’s sail to the moon on a raft made out of old Blackberries”), and as likely to become reality…but when Jill, Susan, Lolly and Joe  got drunk last Wednesday night and decided “let’s hitch to Glasto tomorrow and try and get over the wall!” , two out of four of us woke up the next morning still determind to make it happen.

Well, we say “morning” – Jill was up morningish after being summoned to the pub by iain, and since she hadn’t heard from Susan by about midday assumed that she had forgotten our “right we’re leaving for Glasto at 9am tomorrow” pledge, and thus resigned herself to a nice afternoon in the King’s Arms beer garden putting the world to rights over some real ales with her favourite hairy amigo…however, Susan rang iain at about 3pm (Jill had yet again lost her phone drunkenly the previous night), asking if she was still up for it. Jill, having topped up last nights beer with the few pints that afternoon, concluded foolishly that indeed yes, she was.

So we met up in Savannah, accompanied by Lolly, iain, Joe and Aaron, all of whom we tried to persuade to join us on our expedition but due to work or homosexual commitments they declined. For the best really, thinking about it, as who the hell would pick up Joe or Iain if they saw them trying to hitch a ride at the side of the road? Plus the more of us, the less likely we are to fit in anyone’s car and they seemed reluctant to agree to dish out their fair share of blowjobs to truck drivers, should it come to it.

At this point, Jill was still less than convinced that we were actually going ahead with it. But then of course, most of the pub (mainly Grant, Kay, Liam, Damian, Willis and Nick Hell) started piping up about how we were talking shit, would never dare do it and would still be sitting on Savannah’s settee this time tomorrow. Saying thus to Jill and Susan is on a par with calling Marty McFly “chicken”. 

So, we drank up, said our goodbyes, called everyone tossers, apologised to Nick in case we didn’t make it back for his wedding reception the following day (still thinking we would end up standing by the A19 for an hour, get bored and come home) and set off for Jill’s to get supplies. Grabbed Jill’s lovely camo pop up tent (now affectionately named Raphael, due to it making us look like a kind of ninja turtle when worn on your back), filled a beach bag full of what booze was left lying around the flat, sleeping bag, change of clothes etc. then to Susan’s parents’ to scavenge food. Her parents seemed less than impressed with the plan (although we were a bit economical with the truth and told them our friend was giving us a lift and we weren’t hitching. Uh-uh, not us. We’d even drafted in Joe to pick us up from theirs and take us to the A19 so it would be convincing.) but nonetheless gave us a fine selection of foods to take, and her dad thrust a tenner at us bless him. At about 8pm we set off in Joe’s car. And so it began…

The Mission: “Get to Glastonbury and into the festival on not even 1p”

The Rules: You are not allowed to spend any money on getting down to, or into Glasto. You are allowed money on the way (Susan had that tenner from her dad and Jill had a couple of quid change in her bag) but it’s only allowed to be spent on drink and must be spent BEFORE reaching the festival site.

Our Supplies: 1 punnet cherry tomatoes, 1 punnet of grapes, 2 packets of fake ham, one bag of fake sausages and fake scotch eggs, 2 lumps of cheese, 1 bag of pasta sauce, 1 loaf of bread, 1 bag of asda fine cut salad, 3 bananas, 4 satsumas, 1 bag of suspect looking pineapple bits, an assortment of dried noodles/pasta/couscous sachets (although we had no means of making them, just assumed we would befriend someone with a stove or something), 1 small bottle of vodka, 2 litres of coca cola, 1 bottle of palinka (aka “pinge” – dubious Romanian moonshine that has been sitting in Joe’s fridge for about a year and we think has dissolved most of the inside of the plastic waterbottle it’s been kept in and is now probably carcinogenic and generally “wrong”), 8 cans of stella, 1 bottle of cider, 10 Lambert & Butler, directions to the Glasto site printed off Autoroute, 2 rolls of xmas wrapping paper and a marker (for making our signs to hold by the road)

Joe ended up taking us as far as Leeds services (we think? Somewhere down there anyway…) after getting as far as Scotch Corner and deciding to go a bit further (methinks he secretly did want to be part of our adventures, mainly for the chance to suck lots of trucker cock …) where we sat on a nice bit of grass (services always have nice bits of grass don’t they?) for a spot of dinner, a few cans and to make our first “GLASTO” sign out of wrapping paper to hold up. We were amazed when it didn’t take that long for our first “proper” ride (Joe doesn’t count, as he has a tiny penis). 

Ride #1 – Jim
Susan had just gone to the loo in the services and Jill was happy chilling with a cigarette, half heartedly waving our sign around when lo! it appeared! A beautiful baby blue, VW camper van. He MUST be going to Glastonbury too – surely? As Susan came out, Jill yelled “SUSAN!! CAMPER VAN!!!” and we both waved a lot and held our sign up. The bloke inside seemed to think about it and then agreed to pull around after he’d got his fuel. Turned out he wasn’t going to Glastonbury, but would be happy to take us as far as Northampton. Score.

The camper was amazing too. we want one! Jill was slightly concerned about the very rattley door that took about five good hard slams to close properly (you all know her and car doors…), especially when Jim tried to reassure me with “Don’t worry, it’s only fallen off once!”. We ended up all squeezing in the front seats as it was so noisy in there once it was going any speed, we couldn’t hear each other talk and were getting bored of yelling. Jim was lovely, and we had a good crack on talking bollocks. We attempted to entertain him singing Tenacious D and the Shirehorses, and the poor bloke didn’t even stop the car and boot us out, as any sane human would. He even mentioned that his mate in Northampton was also going to Glasto, and when we got there he would ring him and see if there was room in the car for him to take us. Unfortunately, he had already set off when he rang, but the thought was there. So, some amount of time later (no idea, wasn’t paying attention), we arrived at the services outside of Northampton, thanked and waved goodbye to our new friend Jim and his sexy camper and collapsed on another nice bit of grass, all radiant with confidence of our fabulous hitch-hiking skills, to consult our map and plan the next move.

Our smugness was shortlived however, as it took us over an hour to get the next ride. All of the trucks were heading the wrong way and all of the cars and vans were normal folk, wary of picking up hitchhikers, especially crazy (and by this stage quite tipsy) hippy girls. So after some pacing around and pondering of the map, we decided to wander round to the slip road for the road that we should be getting next and see who we could flag down there, as theoretically they would all be heading the right way. Result…

Ride #2 – R**** M*** Bloke (can’t remember his name and he said not to mention the company he worked for if we wrote an article about it, as he would get fired for picking up hitchers)
Fuck me! Our first truck!!!!! Whooooot! And a lovely truck it was too. I do believe it even had Hot Rod flames on it. The bloke was going to the depot in Swindon, so agreed to take us there. He was also very canny and we talked a load of crap, gave him relationship advice, sang along to the radio and learned many a useless piece of info such as “Did you know, that the woman carrying the coffee tray on the cover of “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp, was John Travolta’s mother?”. Fascinating. Susan also mentioned how nice and non-pervy everyone had been so far, to which Jill added “Yeah! We haven’t had to blow ANYONE yet!” and he gave us a very confused look and mumbled that he wasn’t like that but he wouldn’t mind a little kiss from one of us. Which of course he didn’t get. Well Jill wasn’t going to, as he said that he thought she was older than Susan. Admittedly, he did say Jill looked 22, and Susan 20…which considering we’re 29 and 34 is pretty good going, but still…it’s the principle. He dropped us in Swindon somewhere anyway, and pointed us in the right direction for the next road to hitch on so we trundled off towards a dubious looking flyover. 

Susan was mid-wee in the hedge when Jill heard her whisper loudly “Jill! There’s someone else in the hedge!”. 
“Where?” 
“in the next cubicle!”
So she peered through the hedge to investigate, and couldn’t see anything as it was pitch black, but heard rustling. “Yeah! I think there is a bloke in there… I think he’s having a wank!” 
Susan had a closer look along the hedge “Yeah! He so IS having a wank!”. And even with us staring and giggling he didn’t miss a stroke! So we continued on our merry way to the motorway sliproad, laughing about the absurdity of it all. Yes, it probably wasn’t the most desirable situation to be in, but we were high on crazy adventure adrenalin and vodka, and hey – we were hitch-hiking for god’s sake. Being wanked on in a privet while having a piss is NOTHiNG!

So anyway, we found our next road* and within ten minutes or so, had flagged down another big truck.

Ride #3 – John

John was a lovely older bloke, who picked us up as we reminded him of his daughters who were “about your age” (who blatantly weren’t, as he was telling us about their ponies and scholarships and things) and he didn’t want to see a couple of young girls standing around roads at this time in the morning (think it was about 1am by then). Told us all about said daughters, who to be honest sounded like total spoilt madams who’s poor Dad worked all hours long distance driving to provide them with lap tops and horses and private schools. Nonetheless, Susan and him had an indepth chat about horses, during which Jill probably fell asleep. He dropped us off as far as he could in the right direction, where we promptly got totally lost trying to find which was the right road to get us to Bristol and ended up in Lydiard Tregoz, which we found hilarious for some reason. Turned out that was the correct road anyway and soon  found another truck (although Susan reckons it was more a large van).

Ride #4 – Adul the Polish man
Adul was an old Polish bloke who didn’t speak much English  who agreed to take us near Bristol. We sang a lot of songs at the poor bloke whilst finishing off the cider and stella, and as he couldn’t understand us we drunkenly whittered on about boys and sex and the like. He dumped us on the hard shoulder somewhere along the M4 and told us the next junction was just round the corner and there were services there. It wasn’t and after an hour or so of tramping alongside the motorway (illegal, kids. Don’t do it. in fact don’t EVER do ANYTHiNG me and us and our friends do.) the sun had come up, it was about 4.30am and we were exhausted, so we popped open the tent on a nice bit of grass between some electricity boxes on the verge by the hard shoulder, made fake ham sandwich, toasted to our progress so far with vodka and coke and a swig of palinka (*shudder*) and snuggled up in the one sleeping bag, as Susan had forgot hers.

There you go. Day 1. Next installment tomorrow 🙂