The slip road onto the M4 had nowhere really suitable for people to stop and pick me up. One of my three golden rules for hitch-hiking is to make sure there's somewhere for drivers to pull over safely, without disrupting the flow of traffic or potentially causing an accident.
After ten minutes of holding my sign out, I checked the satellite picture of my location on Google Maps to see if there was a layby up on the main carriageway which would be a more suitable place to stand. Google Maps works really well in situations like this - their maps are good too but I tend to rely on my trusty AZ Handy Road Atlas of Great Britain, as I can make notes on the pages, and my phone gets messy if I try to write on the screen.
It was during this technical interlude that someone stopped, parking their car as far to the left as possible to avoid the traffic tearing off the roundabout onto the slip road. I ran up to the car and again spotted someone in the front seat furiously rearranging belongings on the seat I was to occupy - again, in the back.
The couple were off to Cheltenham for the weekend and would be changing direction at Swindon - perfect for me as I'd be heading south where they'd be heading north. The conversation was lovely, the driver regaling me with tales of their hitch-hiking around Europe, the passenger embellishing her stories with observations of his own.
They were an adorable couple and I could have quite happily travelled hundreds of miles with them. As appears to be a theme of this journey, it was over all too quickly and before I knew it, we were pulling onto the expansive hard shoulder just before junction 15 of the M4. Still enjoying the glory of the warming September sunshine, I walked up to the roundabout, turned left and found myself on the first single-carriageway road since my first pickup, about eighty minutes previously.
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