I hitchhiked with my boyfriends across the Balkans last summer. We made some awesome and interesting encounters as well! Here is what happened on only the first day we tried hitchhiking: http://foundonland.tumblr.com/post/96595634115/first-time-hitchhiking http://foundonland.tumblr.com/post/96701704525/hichkiking-adventures-from-romania It was no race so we had some nice leeway to just hang out and go with the flow of things. We did slept at the house of the person that picked us up twice during the whole trip. I guess saving money is one of the reason we did it, but we could have afforded buses too. If was just more of an adventure this way :)
That's some great encounters ! Yeah, I think it's important to just take a moment and enjoy where you are. We arrived at the periphery of Utrecht by truck (trucks can't go into the city), so we were some kilometers away from the finish line of our first destination. We were near a match of field hockey and we posed to just relax and enjoy. It was funny, because the crowd (18 years old) had big buckets of beer (3 liters) and we don't have that in France near playing fields. So we just posed, taked a beer, watch the match, and it finished 10-15 minutes after we arrived -- we were pretty lucky because then we found a player which was going home, directly to the heart of Utrecht, at the finish line of our race. There are some great tips here : http://hitchwiki.org/en/Top_Tips Basically, we found that having a sign isn't really necessary, because most people will not stop if they don't go to the city, even if they can help you by taking you for some period of time in the right direction. Most important : (1) Good spot : that means the car/truck can stop with safety and without interfering with traffic. The best spots are gas station on the highway, because people are going your way (generally) and if there is place in their car, it's extremely difficult to say no if you are a logical person. (2) Eye Contact/Speaking : I read on your blog you were shy of maintaining eye contact. I'm more an introvert than an extrovert person, but in the context of the race, we had to find a car, and the best way was really to just knock on cars to speak with them and to explain the situation. If you can speak to the person, I would say there is a 50/50 probability it's going to be good if they are going your way. It's harder to say no when you speak to them than when you just have your thumbs up.
Yeah, that was our first ever time hitchhiking so at first it's a bit uncomfortable. We got better pretty fast and were pros by the end of it ;) I found that our big Canadian flag really helped A LOT. Many people stopped to ask if we were really from Canada and then told us to hop in since they were already stopped. Huge facepalm when I forgot it in someone's car towards the end of our trip.