On the road again.

I left Paris about 2 days ago. I took a late start leaving around 12 o-clock. I took the RER to Massy where I did my first attempt at sign hitch hiking, because I still don't know or speak enough French to as for a ride and where they are going and so forth. After an hour or so a van of a 3 guys pulled over and more or less asked if i wanted a ride. When I grabbed my bags and turned around they speed off laughing. Just goes to show that even thought there are nice people out there willing to go out of their way to help a stranger out there are still the few that will go out of their way to make it hard on people. After deciding to try a differnet road to get onto the A10 I found a bigger piece of cardboard and made a new bigger and better sign. Only after 10 minutes or so, a guy stopped and picked me up. He said he was picking me up because he was about to be doing the same thing in South America and thought he would start by helping me out. We got to talking and it turned out that Vincent was a member of the website that I have been using to find places to stay, and offered me to stay at his place for the night and he would drop me off at the entrence to the highway in the morning on his way to work. He ended up taking me to see this really big castle near Blois called Chateau de Chambord. We made a quick walk around it and he was very informative about the whole thing. He told me that there is a stair case in the middle of the castle that is a double helix designed by Leonardo da Vinci. After we drove back to his place in the middle of Blois. We had dinner and went to bed. The next morning he dropped me off at the entrance to the highway where people were car pooling to work, so only after 10-15 minutes someone stopped and offered me a ride to Poitiers, where I thought that I had a place to stay for the night. Once in Poitiers I stuggled to find an internet connection in order to find out where I would be staying for the night. After no luck with that I called Dylan, the french student from Cardiff, and they said that I would probably be able to make it to Mont-de-Marsan by the night. So I continued on and found another ride just to the next service station outside of Poitiers where I was able to get a drink and make a new sign. After a little while of waiting with my shinny new sign a young french guy stopped and offered me a ride as far as he could take me. He didn't speak much english so I thought it would be a good time to try my french out. I was only able to ask the few things that were suited for the situation form my phrase book. He was only able to take me a few miles to the next station where a car of 3 stopped for coffee and offered to take me as far as Bordeaux, which was a pretty good chunk out of the trip so I took their offer and cramed into the car with my bags. I was able to get a little sleep in before we came into Bordeaux. They asked if I would be staying there or if I wanted to stay on the highway to try to get another ride. I told them to drop me off at the next gas station, where I meet up with a couple more people hitch hiking to Moroccoo from the UK. We talked for a little while about out experiances and they left to head the other direction then I was going. This is were it starts to get annoying. I tried to get a ride for maybe 3 hours before deciding to call it a night and set up my tent. I had been standing on the corner of the store asking peopl for rides but I'm not sure if none of them wanted to give a ride to someone that couldn't speak french or if they actually weren't going the direction I needed to be going. I was about to go in and ask the station tendent if there was an area near by where I could set up my tent and as I was going up to the door I heard a "click", I went to open the door and it was locked. The attendent had seen me coming and locked the door so I couldn't get in. So instead I set up my tent next to the station and laid down, I say laid down and not sleep because for one I was still right next to the highway and two a few truck drivers had come into the station to find it was full and had their head lights pointing right into my tent. Only being ale to get an hour max of sleep at a time i waited until 6 o clock to get up and see what was going on. A thick fog had set in over night covering my tent with dew. So I shook my tent off as much as possable and packed it up. I gave it another 45 minutes of getting no ride before I decided that I would walk to the other side of Bordeaux and hope to have better luck from there. I found a bus stop and was able to get to a station where I was then able to find out where a train station was, and so I decided as long as the ticket wasn't more then what I had on me, only 15 eruros then I would take the train to Mont-de-Marsan. It turned out to be exactly 15 euros, so I bit the bullet and got on the train. When I showed up to Marsan I wasn't sure if Dylan had gotten my my text I sent him and right as I walked out onto the street to see about walking to where I thought he lived he pulled up in a van and hanked. He had just pulled up to the station as I walked out. We drove back to his place and I was greated with a warm welcome and a cucumber to cut up for lunch.
I'm staying in a little guest house in front of their beautiful home. They have about an acre of land with a nice two storie house which is wonderfully decorated with a super homey feel to it. I was able to set up my tent to dry out side from the dew that had settled on it from the night before. I think this will be a nice stay here and I hope to learn as much french as I can. His family all speak english, but said they would speak french most of the time so that I can learn and if i have to they will be able to translate for me.
Again pictures will have to wait since I found out that I have more then 450 and at 4 mb each that is going to take forever to load with a wireless connection unless I go through and sort out the bad ones.