We're back! I always try to follow up on the outcome of a thing I ask about online so someone who stumbles on a thread in a forum can benefit from whatever was learned in the actual application of the advice.
After 88 days of travel, driving all over Western Europe, from Amsterdam to Brussels to Paris to the Southern reaches of Spain, up to Madrid and across to Barcelona and the French and Italian Rivieras, through Liguria and Tuscany to Rome, from Rome to the Dolomites, then parts of Austria and Germany to eastern France, back down through western Germany into Switzerland and across to Annecy below the French Alps, to Lyon, Paris, back through Ghent to Rotterdam and finally back to our car drop off point south of Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, I can say that the decision to lease the car we did (a new 2024 Peugeot 2008, as discussed above) was probably one of the best decisions we made in all of our trip planning. It was incredible fun, super convenient, sometimes challenging and a little intimidating, but we saw Europe in a way nobody relying on inter-city trains could have seen it.
In 9,100 km of travel, we drove through Europe's biggest cities, navigated ridiculously tiny cobbled alleys in the medieval cores of Granada's Albaicin, suffered the tolls of the French highway system, and sped along stretches of Germany's autobahn. We slalomed twisty mountain roads, crept along the rutted single-lane dirt trail to our agriturismo outside of Montepulciano, dodged speeding bicyclists in the roundabouts of Holland and Belgium, and survived the swarms of scooters that split Rome's lanes at every red light.
We learned a lot about the countries we visited because of the car. We stayed in 34 different accommodations, and quickly settled into a very easy and quick protocol of packing and unpacking the car, stopping at roadside attractions as various as abandoned and crumbling castles in the Spanish countryside, quaint churches and farm fields in rural France, Italy's fantastic rest stops, and small town pizza places halfway from place to place. Europe's roads are peppered with illustrated brown signs pointing you to places of historic interest. Random stop opportunities abound.
We stopped in towns between destinations that we decided to visit only the morning we headed out. Reims, France on the way to Paris, and Burgos, Spain on the way to Salamanca stand out as fantastic stops we'd never have made without the car. The Roman city of Italica, outside Seville...Amazing!! Even discoveries as seemingly mundane as the amazing food available at an E. Leclerc hypermarket or the friendly staff and bright organized shelves of France's Leroy Merlin (their Home Depot) turned out to be highlights of the trip.
It wasn't all hearts and flowers. It seemed that every gas station had a different system for payment. While I eventually got more proficient at figuring this out (without speaking any of the local languages) each trip to the gas station was a tad stressful. Ha! We must have driven past two hundred or more speed cameras, drove in and out of fifteen or twenty low emission zones (with and without realizing it), and even past cameras into some ZTLs (limited traffic zones) where our host had to register our car in advance with the police to avoid and automated ticket. We didn't get a single ticket of any sort on the entire trip. The few times we used Google Maps to avoid toll roads, mostly to drive through the country and see small towns, it was a real mixed bag. Toll roads in Europe are usually in places where the alternative includes driving crazy routes through dozens of tiny towns over twice the time. I have so many stories! Ha!
We stayed near places that had easy access to public transit and almost never moved the car unless it was time to go from one apartment to another. I kept track of every penny spent on everything by category. Happy to answer questions, and will check back occasionally. What an adventure!
