Jailbreak - the life of a trucker

Following the taxi drivers' advice we headed straight for the lorry park and before we knew it a poundland lorry stopped and let us climb on. We'd joked earlier about how fun it would be to ride in a huge lorry and now we finally had the chance! However, lorries only have one passenger seat so one of us had to sit on the driver's bed, behind the seats. For this reason, some drivers refused to take both of us. Additionally, many of them are not insured to carry any passengers, but lots of kindly drivers broke the rules for two harmless, rain-soaked girls. The lorry driver, Lee, was studying for a maths degree and he gave us lots of tips for getting lifts with lorries. He told us to approach lorries and knock on their doors, and that lorries with containers on the back were more likely to be going abroad. The early morning getting to us, we fell asleep on our way to Birmingham.

'Trucker' as a modern foreign language....

When we left Lee, we managed to get a lift almost straight away by approaching drivers. Stewart was our next driver, who took us to Corley. We soon began to learn a lot about lorry drivers. They all opened up and told us a lot about their lives because it can be a pretty lonely job. Lee (the first lorry driver) was lucky in that he got to go home to Birmingham at the end of each day. Most others, such as Stewart, would be on the road all week, sleeping in lay-bys and showering at service stations. It was especially sad for Stewart who had two young children (although considering how excited Amina and I were to be riding in lorries, I can't imagine how exciting it would be for his 3-year-old son!).  Stewart reccomended hitching with Eddie Stobart lorries and mentioning to DFDS or Norfolk Line ferries that we'd had a lift in a Norfolk Line truck. Arriving in Corely it was raining and lots of the lorries were empty. Luckily, our next lift, Tom, took pity on us and let us on board and gave us each a hot KFC wrap. If spending the whole week on the road wasn't lonely enough, Tom's wife works 3 weekends out of 4 so they only see each other once a month (although he didn't seem to mind too much)! He did ring her when we were with him but she refused to believe he had two charity hitchhiers with him! Tom was also helpful, trying to get us a lift with his mate Craig, who was going to Austria (we were to late) and taking us to Thurrock services, the big stop before going 'over the water', as truckies call it!

At Thurrock we found some very familiar penguins from Durham, and later some familiar tigers and also a familiar smurf! We found out the penguins had been at the station for hours, it was getting late and most of the lory drivers there (there were A LOT of lorries!) were going to bed for the night. Amina and I panicked at seeing a 'closes at 10pm' sign in the services so tried desperately to get to another services! Although it turns out M&S shut at 10pm but the service station was actually open all night. We gave the Travelode next door a shot to see if we could get a room but we had no luck. Assuming we'd get no further that day, we tried (and failed) to make ourselves comfortable on metal service station seats to spend the night...