Welcome to my website dedicated to Hitchhiking Tips and Backpacking Travel insights. My name is Claudio Adrian Dobre; I am a hitchhiker and adventurer from Europe. Hitchhikers from Europe know me simply as “Adrian”. Started to hitchhike in 2004 and every year I hitchhike around 10000 km. I built this website with the purpose to help and inspire people to travel by hitchhiking; learn to travel by hitchhiking with my hitchhiking tips and backpacking travel insights based on my personal experience accumulated during the years. On this page there is only some personal information about me, for the tips and insights please see the category Hitchhiking Tips & Backpacking Insights or open the menu.
Already at a very young age I was pretty much a rebel. Then, the older I got the more I naturally started to think out of the box to find alternative ways of accomplishing goals. If people who know me since a lifetime were asked to describe me, they would probably say that I am a fountain of ideas and that I have courage.
I am adventurous and I find traveling educational. In time I also realized that each trip we make is an investment we make in ourselves… it improves and enriches us. Usually I don’t travel to a place with the purpose to have a vacation; I travel to a place because I am curious to see with my own eyes and feel what that place is like. While during the first decade I hitchhiked mostly because I had to get to some part of the continent for a reason or another, nowadays I hitchhike mostly for the beauty of the adventure that this activity brings – and more in general the journey – an adventure which unfolds as the trip goes on. One of the aspects that I value about the art of hitchhiking is the fact that through the problem-solving process which stimulates out of the box thinking to overcome the difficulties and challenges that inevitably arise along the journey one develops abilities that are useful in many other areas of Life.
While on one hand hitchhiking got naturally into my life, on the other hand it was Life itself that put me in the position of having to travel through the continent so often that later naturally made me choose hitchhiking as main style of traveling. Then during the years, hitchhiking thousands of kilometers experience got accumulated and with it also the way I hitchhiked got perfectionated to be as effective as possible. Based on my personal statistics, this is the approximate amount of kilometers per each year that I hitchhiked in the last decade:
Hitchhiking involves also a lot of camping and hiking. In time, through this travel style, I also got to know myself better. My spirit is wild, I identify my spirit with that of a wolf and I realized that a strong connection with forests and mountains is deeply rooted in me. When I am outdoors, surrounded by nature, I feel like my energy is being regenerated. Hiking on lower mountains covered by forest, making a fire and cooking food on it, falling asleep under a starry night sky, are some of the activities I enjoy a lot.
Hitchhiking is an activity based on the interaction with complete strangers. I find it amazing how we meet thousands of people, and none of them really touch us. And then we meet one person, and our life is changed forever.