Once again, in a spasm of pedantry he cannot resist, David is driven to look at this year’s trip in light of Henry James’s epigraph on our homepage:
“My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.”
(But first, a confession: I cannot make myself enjoy Henry James. With that out of the way):
“A perfect automobile”
We had more Rover-related problems on this trip than on the first two, but they were all avoidable. For instance, if we’d been suspicious and checked the manufacture dates of the inboard rear tires before we left the US to see whether they were as new as the four whose dates we could see, we would have discovered they were ten years old (!). We’d have replaced them and avoided the loss of a tire tread in Austria.
And we could have noticed that the chassis battery was Motorcraft, therefore probably 8- or 9-year-old original equipment, and unlikely to be forgiving if I left the lights on for three hours--which I did--and we could have replaced it before we left.
(Incidentally, it was disconcerting to learn how unavailable a Motorcraft 750-amp battery could be even in a large city like Vienna. Yes, Ford is all over Europe; but parts for a V-10 Triton gas engine are much less available than I’d thought.)
“Thirty miles an hour”
Our travel this year has been much faster than on our first two trips because much more of it has been on Interstate-type highways. This, in turn, is a result of the fact that we travelled much farther this year--all the way from Amsterdam to Naples--before starting back again.
Besides that:
(a) Italy is full of mountains, so any travel on an east-west axis involves climbing and descending (and travel in the northwest in any direction does, too);
(b) Italian autostradas through mountains are already about as scary as I can stand, so there’s no way I’d want to use the 30-mph alternatives;
(c) in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland, places we wanted to see tended to be right next door to the campground (which meant taking a bus or train) or a hundred miles away, not 30-40. The latter meant a choice between two hours on an Interstate-type highway or 3-4 hours on a scary, tiring “red road” or even “yellow road” (Michelin map readers will know what that means).
(About driving:
(As soon as we crossed the border from Italy to Austria, I found the driving easier because there were fewer stimuli-per-second assaulting me. Austrian drivers pulling up to intersections from side roads did not poke their noses beyond the white line; they did not pass on curves and expect oncoming traffic to accommodate them; Austrian pedestrians did not jaywalk; most astonishingly, Austrian motorcyclists obeyed the same traffic rules everyone else did. The more predictably they behaved, the easier it was to deal with the ordinary European driving challenges: chicanes in towns, narrowing roadways, tram tracks, etc.
(Another thing: we’ve learned that road maps are practically useless unless they are in a scale of 1:200,000 or bigger. The Michelin spiral-bound France map is that big--buy it; however, Michelin also publishes a spiral-bound Germany/Austria/Switzerland/Czech map which sounds like a great deal until you realize that even Germany is 1:300,000--barely adequate--while all the others are 1:400,000. Not good.)
“A smooth road”
Many of the autostradas/autobahns were smooth, which reduced the stress of driving nearly to zero, except for tunnels, absurdly high bridges, etc. Red and yellow roads were often rutted or patched, which made driving them all the more difficult. There was more road construction on this trip than we encountered on the earlier two, but it was usually well-marked.
We became thoroughly mistrustful of our GPS on this trip, especially in towns and cities. By mistake we had left our original one at home when we flew to Europe, and even though the substitute we bought was the same model as we’d had before, it seemed more determined than ever to take us to campgrounds via what it thought were the shortest or fastest routes . . . even when doing so meant abandoning major roads and going up steep hills on narrow streets. We think we need a GPS that gives us a “truck route” option.
“A twelfth-century cathedral”
In Italy and Austria, the churches were usually not that old, although often their foundations were centuries older. The default style, especially in Italy, was Baroque, and I rediscovered that I prefer Gothic: in Italy, that means Pisa and Siena; in France, anywhere you look.
We also saw some spectacular museums (especially the new Pompidou Centre in Metz, France) and some great collections: we’d expected to find treasures in Rome and Florence and Vienna, and did, but Basel’s museums were a great surprise on the last two trips, as was Zurich’s this year.
Europeans we met in the campgrounds often asked why we went to the trouble to visit Europe when we could be exploring the US: “it’s so big,” they’d say. Well, yes--but Europe is where things happened 500 and 2000 years ago that helped determine what Americans would be like 300 years ago . . . and today. “Ah,” they would say, “you are interested in the culture.” We’re interested in walking where our ancestors, broadly conceived, have walked and seeing what the giants of Western civilization have created--and, often, destroyed. If you take an RV to Europe, you not only get to see some of that, you get to see how your reactions to that experience differ from those of people who have lived among them all their lives. Great fun. And you provide them endless entertainment as you try to speak their languages, which is all to the good.