Driving the European way..........................................................


In our last two trips, we have driven over 37,000 km (almost 23,000 miles) in Europe. Naturally, we made numerous observations about how driving on the Continent differs from driving in the US.

Why drive?

Well, after all, we are Americans who live in the great American West, so driving is what we do. But beyond that, although there is public transportation all over Europe to even the smallest towns, it just doesn't work for us. We're no longer at the age where we feel like schlepping luggage on and off of trains on a regular basis, or waiting at the bus stop for the once-a-day service.

Driving is the best way to get beyond the usual tourist places and see how the natives take their vacations. A car takes you out of the big cities and into the countryside. It allows you to explore those little roads and winding country lanes, find that restaurant on the edge of the Tarn, the bar at the top of an Alpine pass. As in America, a car is freedom.

Some of our favorite drives

The rolling hills of central Portugal in April when they are covered with wildflowers .

The Picos de Europe of northern Spain where the road winds in and out of patches of forest before it breaks out above the tree line to crawl up granitic slopes until you are at the very top of the world, with cloud-shrouded peaks stretching out in all directions to the horizon.

The coastal roads in Brittany along dark rocky shores with surf-battered lighthouses and fleets of yeachts heeled hard in unison, sailing on the same point of wind out to infinity.

The Route de Cretes above the Gorge du Verdon in the south of France and the nearby little roads through the lavender fields.

The route from Bolzano to Cortina through the Dolomite Alps of northern Italy with three major mountain passes and incredible granite peaks gashing the sky.

The Alsace, where you pass through one absurdly picturesque village after another as you climb through the forested mountains to viewpoints that look out past the Rhine and into the Black Forest of Germany.

The valley of the Moselle where the vineyards hang almost perpendicularly from the steep hills above the river.

The mountainous roads of northern Wales where the mist lies on the peaks and the waterfalls spring from incredibly green hillsides.

And on and on and on, too many to recount. In the past five years, we have spent almost a year driving on the Continent and in England and it would take a whole book to include every drive that we enjoyed.

Some things we've learned

Fuel costs
When you see the price of fuel and the width of the streets, you understand why cars in Europe tend to be small. On this trip, the average pump price for diesel was around 1.08 euros, sometimes higher. This translates into pretty close to $5 a gallon. In England, it was closer to $7.

We never quite worked out the math on the fuel economy (too many metric-US conversions with miles/Km, gallons/liters), but everytime we filled the tank it was around $65 and the on-board computer would tell us we had about 1,000 Km to go before we needed to fill up again. So, the 17,000 km we drove this year cost us a little over $1000, which over the course of almost 4 months wasn't a huge component of our travel budget.

Our car

We had used the Peugeot purchase/buyback program to purchase a brand-new Peugeot 307 SW which was registered and insured in my (Linda's) name although as it happened, Al did all the driving this time. The 307 SW is roughly equivalent to a Ford Focus station wagon. This is the second time that we have used the program. In a nutshell, if you reside outside the EU, you can buy the car, use it for a pre-determined length of time, then give it back to Peugeot. You pay in advance for the number of days that you are going to use it and if you don't give the car back, they can collect the balance from your bank account. Yikes! You can't bring it home because it's not US-certified. You get zero-deductible insurance so you don't have to worry about any little dings like you might on a traditional lease. It is cheaper than renting a car, which you can't do for such a long time anyway.

You get a brand new car with AC, standard transmission, and whatever bells and whistles the planning types think will resell. You can pay for smaller and more basic or fancier and bigger cars than we did. Ours had a glass roof which was exposed at the touch of a button and is not useful in the hot summer sun but which might be nice on gloomy winter days. It had remote entry system, an on-board computer, a reasonably fancy sound system, and headlights that went on and off automatically which was really nice when driving through the Alps and encountering a lot of tunnels. It had a turbo-charged diesel engine which allowed us to save a few cents a liter on fuel and it had all the get-up-and-go that we needed in the mountains. It was, in brief, a much nicer car than we drive at home. Al loved it.

The only quirk about 'buying' a car on this program is that the license plate is bright red, not the white or yellow background of normal plates. Since a national pastime in France seems to be looking at license plates to see where the car is registered, we noticed a lot of stares and puzzled expressions. This can get kind of annoying, but again, it's nothing personal. Once when we were leaving a rest area after a picnic stop, Al noticed a fellow munching on his baguette and staring at our license plate, so he slowed down, stuck his head out the window and said 'American.' An 'aha' moment ensued: the puzzled look cleared up, the guy smiled, said 'Merci' and we drove on our way.

Driving styles

The hardest thing to get used to is how close European drivers tailgate. Now we know why they were the ones who invented disc brakes, because they really need them. But you also have to understand that it's nothing personal--it's just the accepted distance between vehicles. Everything is close together in Europe.

Of course out on the open road, every driver wants to get in front of you, especially the Germans. But once more, it's nothing personal and has absolutely nothing to do with how fast or slow you're driving. Get in tourist mode and stay to the right.

Speaking of staying to the right, that's what you do on multi-lane highways. You never, ever pass on the right. Big no no. When we got to Phoenix, the shuttle driver taking us home immediately got in the left hand lane on the freeway and stayed there, making traffic pass on the right, which absolutely made us cringe. Do not try this in Europe. Do your passing and get back in the right lane.

The only exception to this is on the autobahns in Germany. You can't get in the right lane because it is bumper-to-bumper trucks. This is a problem when that big Audi comes up behind you and flashes his lights. Fortunately, it's probably a stretch of highway with a speed limit and you'll just need to make sure you're going as fast as the guy ahead of you, because if you pull in the right lane to let that Audi pass, you will never get back to the left lane. Ever. Driving in Germany was the worst on the entire trip primarily because of the constant stream of traffic to and from the former eastern bloc states to the ports in Belgium and the Netherlands.

I always wondered if the the trucks with license plates from places like Turkey and Bulgaria have any safety inspections. Then I saw an article in the newspaper about the French cracking down on tour busses from those former eastern bloc countries and how in the first week of July they had taken 17 of these off the road for safety violations. Scary.

Oh yeah, remember that there is no such thing as a free right turn on red. Which makes sense because under normal conditions, people have no qualms about pulling out right in front of you, so a free right would just encourage a steady stream of turners without regard to traffic with the green.

So, who were the worst drivers? You often hear that Italian drivers are the worst, but in our experience, they were pretty average. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not the fastest drivers that are the problem, it's the slowest ones on the autoroutes. We found in Portugal especially but also in Spain, you'd be cruising along at 120 or 130 kmh and all of a sudden here's some guy doing maybe 85, probably more like 70. This really messes up the traffic and is a real hazard, especially when he makes the slow trucks pull out to pass him. You'd see the same things on some of the two-lane roads, too, where inevitably there would be oncoming traffic so you couldn't pass.

Motorcycles

Motorcycles are terrifying in Europe. There is no other word for it. On the positive side, helmet laws are in force everywhere. On the negative side, these guys are maniacs. They seem to think that if they are on the center line, it's OK to pass with oncoming traffic or on blind curves. Or they will pass you while you're in the process of passing someone else. Of course on the autoroutes they will go right up the lane line, squeezing between automobiles and truckes.

I was always afraid that we'd see some moto-driver spread out like jam across the pavement, but the worst we ever saw was some guy from GB who had been driving up the lane line in a traffic jam in Belgium. Someone must have wandered in their lane and clipped him slightly because as we drove by, he was inspecting the scratches on his hard-case pannier but he himself didn't look the worse for wear.

Bicycles

Bicycles have the right to be on the pavement and you must pass them as if they were another vehicle. In other words, wait until the on-coming lane is clear. It doesn't matter if the guy is grinding up a 12 per cent grade in the Alps and there is a blind corner. You wait until you can see the road ahead and get completely into the on-coming lane. This is one of the few rules of the road that is always followed.

Traffic enforcement
If you have a 'personal rights' problem with traffic cameras in the US, you're going to be really unhappy in Europe because they are all over there. Even more so in the UK. However, there are always signs alerting you that one is ahead, so if you blast through one, you're being really dumb.

The French gendarmes use hand-held radar which looks like huge binoculars, not those radar guns like you see in the US. They just stand next to a building or behind a bush and aim away. I don't see how they can possible catch anyone when they are driving Peugeot 107s, which are almost laughably tiny. (It's like seeing the VW disgorge clowns at the circus when 4 gendarmes pile out of one.) Maybe they take your picture and send the ticket to you.

We happened to be driving near Le Mans the weekend of the 24-hour race and all of the gendarmes in all of France must have been on the highways leading into town. They had radar traps and groups of motorcycles in addition to those tiny Peugeots. They also had lots of would-be boy-racer customers.

The gendarmes are fond of standing by the side of the road and watching the traffic go by. You'd better watch them too because if they point at you, you are supposed to stop. This happened to us once and after a cursory look at Al's Arizona license, the gendarme waved us on. Must have been bored.

On the other hand, we actually saw very few cops per mile driven in any of the countries in which we drove, so it's not like they are Big Brother or anything.

Traffic signs and finding your way

Happily, all of the EU countries use the standard international signage, although sometimes they use different colors, so if you take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the conventions, it's not a problem. The only time I felt uncomfortable was in western Belgium where they didn't seem to use the standard signs in the villages and since all the signs were in Dutch, I was always convinced we were going to end up the wrong way on a one-way street.

Finding your way is a whole 'nother issue. First, they never heard of a grid system in most of Europe. After all, in the beginning the cows just kind of wandered and made a path. Then the sheep took the easiest route along the hillside. The farmer put his house near the spring and raised his barn in a spot near the field and things just built out from there. Sometime later, they put up a church and more houses clustered around the church square. You can literally see this today in the way that villages are arranged in the countryside.

Secondly, street signs, if they exist, are distinctly non-standard and will probably be on the side of a building, maybe up high, maybe down low, maybe large, maybe small and probably not visible from your angle. Which means that even if you have a map, you won't be able to figure out what street you're on. Or if you are lucky enough to stumble onto the right street, the number probably won't be on the building.

Fortunately, people are really willing to help, but of course you won't be speaking the same language. Even if you have the name of the hotel, you'll be mispronouncing it and the other person won't have a clue as to what you mean. Trust me, I've been there. It helps to have things written down in block letters. I figure that if I can't read European handwriting without difficulty (not even their hand-printing, much less script) then they probably can't read US-formed letters, but we all can read what gets printed out on a laser printer or a computer screen, so that's the font you're aiming for.

If you are looking for a store, don't expect the sign to be easily visible. After all, everyone else already knows where it is. The store sign will be flat against the building and there will be so much clutter that you'll go past it a few times before you finally pick it out. Getting out and walking is the best way to find something if you think you're close, but then you have to make sure you go up and down both sides of the street and look across the street.

In France, at least, you can often spot the bakery from down the street because there will be a little sign hanging out over the sidewalk with a stylized stalk of wheat or something similar. The same is true when looking for the newspaper stand--there is a commonly-used red and yellow sign with an old-fashioned quill pen. The tobacco store has yet another visual cue, but I wouldn't want to help you buy cigarettes. They're too expensive anyway.

Out on the open road, there will be signs pointing to some destination down the route, but you'd best be familiar with the name of every town within 50 miles in the direction you're going because you never know which one they're going to put on the sign. Being able to read a map and studying it really helps. While every country assigns numbers to their highways and roads, don't expect the direction signs to contain that piece of helpful information until you are actually onto the route itself.

Of course the natives all use their GPS navigation devices. I couldn't believe the numbers of cars we saw with them, a big leap in technology from our last trip. When we were going to visit our friends near Heidelberg and I was talking to Sindhu on the phone, she mentioned something about our navigation device. When I told her that we didn't have one and we were relying on a map, she was amazed. In reality, a GPS wouldn't have done us any good because we so rarely had a specific destination. Besides which, we've found some of the most interesting things while 'lost'.

One must also learn to navigate the ubiquitous roundabout. There will be a diagram of the roundabout exits which you may or may not be able to actually interpret before you are thrust into the roundabout itself. The cardinal rule, other than that traffic already in the roundabout has the right-of-way, is to remember that you can go around as many times as you want. Do not exit until you are sure you're going the right way because at sometime you'll invariably realize that you exited one road too soon because you thought you'd been all the way around. I think Al's record is four circuits.

And speaking of right-of-way, this is a sacred subject in France and, I believe, in most other European countries. There is a type of road sign that indicates whether or not the road you are on has the right of way over all intersecting roads and then another sign that annuls the first. Keep track of the status, because if your road does not have automatic right-of-way, then anyone coming from your right on another public road, no matter how small that road may be, has the right of way. Period. In practice, we only have had fists waved at us a couple of times as most people seem to exercise common sense about pressing the issue, but I'd hate to have to deal with a collision caused by failure to yield to some little cowpath.

Roads

Do not expect streets and roads like we have in the US. There isn't enough space.

The autoroutes, autopistas, autobahns, are all pretty good, if not always up to US interstate standards. Once you're off of those, however, the roads are terrible. That's not to say that the surfaces themselves are terrible, except where cobblestones are used, but the roads and streets are narrow, crooked, poorly signed, jammed with traffic and parked vehicles, and generally not good for moving traffic from one point to another at all. Refer to my comments above on cowpaths. That's what a lot of these started out as and they jog around buildings and stone walls and churches, narrowing down where the cows went single file, widening up a little if the farmer had a big herd. You get the idea.

There will be no shoulder on the road because there's just not enough room on the right of way. There may, however, still be cows. Pay attention to the warning signs.

There will be parked cars in your lane. Wait patiently until the on-coming lane is clear.

The whole idea is to remember that you're not in a hurry. Never, ever be in a hurry, because if you are, Murphy's law says that there will be a beer truck making a delivery, parked right in the middle of the only street through the village. Everyone else will be checking their text messages, hopping out to get a pack of cigarettes or a newspaper, or just chilling out. No horns will be honking. Everyone will be patient. Above all, you must cultivate patience. I think they deliberately keep the roads narrow just so people don't get going too fast.

We only heard anyone honk a horn once or twice on the entire trip except on narrow winding roads in Spain where some of the old-timers honk when they approach a blind corner. People don't get bent out of shape when you merge on the highway or when they have to wait for a double-parked car. The only time we saw any obvious irritation expressed was on the German autobahns when a big Mercedes or Audi had to lift their foot from the accelerator for a moment when a lesser car took too long to get out of 'their' lane. Americans could learn a lesson from those 'wild' European drivers.

Speaking of going too fast, don't expect speed limit signs. Sometimes they will be there, but usually only for special situations. When you drive into a different country, at the border there will be a sign alongside the road that gives all of the speed limits for all conditions. Like you can read it in passing! There certainly won't be any place to pull over and take notes. But the deal is, there are standard speed limits and you are expected to know them. Not that anyone pays any attention to them. But who's going to get the speeding ticket? The unwary tourist, of course.


Drinking and driving

European countries are not at all tolerant of drinking while driving and their allowable blood alcohol levels are significantly below the US. We were amazed to find that the autoroute service areas serve and sell beer and wine, but apparently that's for the non-driver. When we were at the Sandeman sherry bodega in Jerez, Spain, the young Norwegian in our group told us that in Norway the allowable blood alcohol level is .02 and that at business dinners, everyone just toys with their alcoholic beverage but they don't actual consume any.

Fortunately, every country has a non-alcohol or low-alcohol beer available, often on tap. The concept of a bar being a place to drink only alcohol is only a US idea. Any time we were in a bar, a high percentage of the people around us would be drinking Coke or Perrier.

Road accidents

The guidebooks will tell you that auto accident rates in Europe are much higher than in the US. In fact, Portugal is supposed to be the worst country in Europe and one of the worst in the industrialized nations. We see more accidents in a week at home than we did in four months of driving on this trip although we did see a couple of big trucks rolled onto their sides in Spain.

Potty stops


One of the reasons that Al loves Europe is that he never has to worry about finding a bathroom. Worst case, you stop by the side of the road, turn your back to the pavement and let go. You see that being done regularly. That works fine for him, but not for me.

On our last trip, I recall having to improvise potty stops on multiple occasions, but on this one, I only had to resort to the weeds once. That's not to say that the weeds wouldn't have been better than some of the toilets I encountered. But it does mean that there seem to be more and more public toilets available. Especially in France, the smaller towns seem to be putting in public toilets. Maybe they're tired of those guys peeing in the weeds at the edge of town.

In restaurants and bars the toilets were almost always clean and sometimes spotless, although occasionally without toilet paper. That's why they sell those little packets of tissue. Never go into a toilet without one.

The autoroutes all have rest areas and some of lesser main highways do also but the only clean ones are likely to be at the full-service areas with a restaurant. In Germany, the highway is free but you have to pay for the restroom. In France, you pay for the highway and the restroom is free, if not always clean. Of course in Germany you can't get into the right lane to exit for the rest area because there are so many trucks, so after a while the French toll roads with their relatively light truck traffic begin to look pretty good. In any case, remember to take your own packet of tissue.

On the Brenner Pass route through Austria, we stopped at a rest area for a potty break. You had to walk around the gas station and along a walkway with a tall cyclone-type fence to get to the toilets at the back of the building. We both went in and did our business, but when we came out, here was the restroom attendant, pointedly gesturing at the little table where there was a tray with some coins and a sign that said we were each supposed to leave 20 centimes. I don't have a problem with paying 20 centimes to use the potty when I really need it, but neither of us had any coins on us since I had stashed them all in the glove box for use in paying the tolls. I really thought that woman was not going to let me out--she literally blocked my way. She was big with frizzy blonde hair and was wearing one of those long white smocks that butchers wear. Of course she didn't speak English. I had visions of Nurse Ratchet (sp?) in "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest." The reason for the fencing was obvious--keep the customers corralled until they paid up. Finally, she got the message that we didn't have any coins and let us pass. Al fetched some coins from the car and passed them through the fence to her. You can bet I made sure she knew he was paying for me also because I didn't want to go down on the deadbeat list even though I had escaped into the free world. Who knows what kind of records they keep.