6. Saarbrucken Germany to Interlaken, Switzerland 1970

After three days in Saarbrucken I was back on the road to Switzerland.  I left that morning headed for Heidelberg and planned to head south from there.  Things did not work out that way.  I had taken three or four rides to get as far as Kiaserslautern, about half way to Heidelberg.
 

It was there that I was given a ride by a young family that convinced me to head south and to skip Heidelberg.  They were headed home to Stuttgart and they would drop me off in a small town called Ettlingen where I could head south while they continued east.  This saved about 125 kilometers of hitchhiking.
I remember doing some more walking that afternoon and spending the night in a field near the road.  About 50 kilometers north of the Swiss border I get a ride from an American couple to the border and on to the youth hostel in Basel Switzerland for the night.  Interlaken would have to wait for the next day

Breakfast the next morning was an apple and more muesli mixed in yogurt.  I really miss that muesli, not the stuff they sell today with all the artificial sweeteners and raisins.  I walked out of Basel to start hitchhiking again and had a leisurely day going up the mountains.  Today on the modern roads it is a two hour drive.  Then it took me most of the day.  The roads were much narrower and had many twists and turns.  You could ride on anything.  That day I remember riding in a wagon pulled by a tractor.  I was very glad it was not a manure spreader.  The old man told me to watch out for the tourist traps and to only shop where the locals shop.  He said that he knew because his son was paid by the government tourist agency to yodel in the mountains on a set schedule because that was what us tourists wanted.

I eventually arrived at the youth hostel in Interlaken.