Jailbreak Journals: part 1

Universities across the country are raising money for charity through challenges for students. One of these challenges is Jailbreak! See how far you can hitch-hike, with no money, away from your university campus in 36 hours. With the University of Gloucestershire's coming up on February 19th and 20th I'll be posting weblogs of group's successes, or maybe messes...
To launch the UoG's hitch-hike for Haiti, let's look back on past students attempts to go the distance.

Stephen Treacy (18) Tom Hutcings (19) Shimarlie Andrew (18)
UWE
5-6 December 2009
Destination: Gibraltar! 1069 Miles
Raised: £200 for YoungMinds

Stephen:

"To start one of my mates lent us his car which we parked up in some random village a few miles away from Bristol airport, and then stuck our thumbs out to get a lift to the terminal. I managed to get us some free flights to Reus after persuasion! At the airport we carried around a box and busked for transport money, which ended up raising about £20 before we got told off...

While we were flying, we asked the cabin crew if they could make an announcement, which turned out amazingly as when we landed a Ryanair captain gave us a lift to Tarragona station, and gave us 30 euros! We bought bus tickets to Valencia which didn't depart until 11pm, so we explored the town, had a few beers and helped ourselves to a free dinner of olive oil bread samples from the Christmas market!

In Valencia they swapped drivers, so we were a bit bad ass and didn't get off!
11 tiring hours of bus journey and 1 stolen wallet later, we arrived in a town called Jaen in Andalucia, where we got some breakfast and tried to figure out where the hell we were...

We made a Malaga sign and stuck our thumbs out again. Within about 20 minutes we got picked up and dropped off on a footpathless motorway junction, so after walking a while we ended up fixing a ride to Malaga airport from a German "short film" director.
After that we managed to get a lift from an old Spanish couple to Marbella. By then we had about 3 hours left and it was getting dark, so it was really unlikely that we'd hitch another ride, until a Jehovah witness picked us up and took us to San Roque, where we blagged our way onto a bus that went to La Linea.
Once in La Linea, Shimarlie's dad picked us up and took us through the border to her house, where we ate, and slept for free!"

Getting Home

"We tried to stay on a bus that went to Barcelona to catch free flights from Reus, but got kicked off at Granada during the night! It was pretty creepy but we finally managed to find a hotel. We ended up having to pay for flights from Malaga two days later."