HitchbikeRevolution

Maybe useful to mention at the beginning: I've been using Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@HitchbikeRevolution) for micro-blogging over the last two month. So if you are directly longing for more info you can have a look there. As there is a limit of 500 characters per post I mostly share small bits and pieces. Whatever I find useful mentioning in order to give a picture about hitchhiking with a folding (touring) bike. Some thoughts. Some pictures. Some links. Or whatever I find worth sharing (or just funny) in the very moment. But these short posts can be of course superficial. For longer posts I was searching for an open source blogging tool. After asking on Mastodon someone pointed me here, to write.as – so here we go:

This is going to be somewhat like an introduction. Maybe start with a who am I? Sure. White, male, German, (half-Armenian roots), 27, recently graduated engineer, so quite privileged. Currently living a more or less nomadic lifestyle. And unsure about my future. Don't really fancy wage labour. I have some money to last a bit. So for the time being, hitchbiking it is. And learning languages.

So what is hitchbiking?

Hitchhiking (autostop) with a bike. In my case I am hitchhiking with a foldable touring bike. Some distances I hitchike. Others I cycle. Often I mix both.

Did I invent the word?

For a second I thought I did. Then I realized that I might not be the first person to do one letter shift. And indeed I wasn't.

Why did I start writing?

I was hitchhiking a lot during the last 3 years. At some point I was fed up with walking. So I wanted to try taking a folding bike. When I came up with the idea to start this experiment I was searching (online) for people who have been doing this. And there was only little information to find. Hitchbiking is not a very common thing to do as you can image. So I thought it might be nice to share my experiences.

What will happen on this blog?

Great stuff.

Where have I been so far?

In order to answer this question I decided to put some rough information on umap – a nice open source mapping tool.

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/hitchbiking-map_179033#5/45.321/5.823

Here you can see where I have been and (probably more interesting for those considering to hitchbike) which distances I hitchhiked alone (blue), hitchhiked with a friend (turquoise), biked (red) or took a train (boooh! – yellow). You can disable the different layers to see where I only hitchhiked/biked.

Where next?

This trip was mostly Italy – Now I am still in Sicily. I'll head back to Germany over the next few weeks and wait for some warmth and then head to France. That's the current plan.

Enough for a first blog post. By the way: Hitchbiking is great fun. Learning Italian is as well.