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It was summer vacation in my hometown. I just turned 18. And, as it usually happens when you are coming from big city to your parents’ place, after few weeks I was so bored from having that lazy routine, so I wanted to start some crazy adventure. I was lucky to grow up with not so strict parents as my friends did. I was usually the youngest and every time we wanted to go hiking or to visit some festival it was much easier for my parents to allow me to do that as for my older friends’ parents. But there was one adventurous guy, who didn’t care about any risks and problems we could be struggling with. So, we decided to make a hitchhiking trip to Eastern Europe. We didn’t have any plan or knowledge how to hitchhike. The main idea was to make it as cheap as possible, so we were planning our budget mentioning only food cost. We were hoping to solve an accommodation question with a help of Couchserfing (of course none of us were verified or even used that app before) and to take a tent. Departure day had come. We met at the center of our small city, just as we met to have a walk every day, not believing we are doing that. We bought tickets to the Hungarian border from the other city, that is 200 kilometers away from our, and we were going to use the regional train, because it was the cheapest way to get there fast. But how surprised we were when at the train station we found out that exactly that day and day after that railroad is closed for repairing and we can’t use the train. I don’t believe in superstitions, but it was strange. We still had 8 hours before other train, and 200 kilometers to get to that city, so we decided to hitchhike there. We stopped the first car after few minutes of standing on the road. It was a lift for half of the way. We were happy, everything seemed so easy. But the car was after the accident, and we were stopping every 2 kilometers, to pour cold water to the cooler. It took 4 hours for us to ride 100 kilometers. Another bad sign. And as a result, we didn’t even get to that city till the midnight. We walked 15 kilometers on the highway to get to the nearest train station. And we didn’t even cross a border. Finally, we were in Hungary, 40 kilometers from the border, at the evening, without the local currency. We spent a night in the tent at the forest and were woke up by some little deer early in the morning. We did it, we were in other country, for the first time. We started hitchhiking on the country road and after few hours of hitchhiking we got a lift to the Debrecen, first big city on our way. But we needed to go to the Budapest, and as unexperienced hitchhikers we went on the highway, the main road to the capital of Hungary. As I understood later hitchhiking on the highway is illegal. We were caught by the police and were fined for 30 Euros each. To compare, my budget for 2 weeks was 100 euros. We lost the third part of our money. We were desperate. Hopefully, the gas station where police left us were a lot of Ukrainian cars wasn’t far away from our country and somehow, we got a lift to Budapest. That time we spent in this city was worth all that troubles we had. That’s how it started. Later we met so many people, seen so many places. We were sleeping on the benches and in forests, eating sausages with bread for two weeks, but it was the true experience, one of the best I had so far. We proved everyone that it’s possible. By the next two years I did three more trips like that, met hundreds of people, went thousands of kilometers with different drivers and still happy that one day I left all the fears behind and leaped into unknown.