UK cheechako

Yes, I am alive

For those of you wondering about me, I am still here. I have returned safe and sound from my travels around the world, despite the efforts of many Italian drivers.

After trips to Italy, Indianapolis, Seattle and Scotland I am back in Nottingham for a while, and therefore able to blog.

I guess I should explain my comment about Italian drivers. For those who have never experienced it, Italy is quite possibly the most dangerous place on earth to drive. As many of you know, YG and I went to Italy for our anniversary (yes, I am well aware that that, along with my last post, was almost 2 months ago). After several days in Venice, battling the Venetians on the Water Buses (story to come later), and a train ride to Rome, we needed to get away from the crowds. So, we decided to rent ourselves a Ford Ka and hit the road up to Tuscany.

To the right you can see YG standing alongside the massive Ka. As you can also see, the rental car place is on the same road as the Colosseum.

We should have known it was going to be an interesting day, when it started with a cabbie with questionable mental capacity. This guy couldn't speak English, which I don't mind, but I am not sure he could speak Italian. After an interesting drive through Rome and driving around the block a couple of times, and us yelling at him to stop, he finally slowed down enough for YG to jump out. Yes, she left me in the car to deal with the Italian version of Rain Man. This nearly sent him over the edge. He started speaking some gibberish and pointing at all kinds of stuff. At this point, I was so mad it took me several minutes to get the money together to pay this idiot. I got myself calmed down, counted out the money, threw it onto the front seat and jumped out. As we came to find out, we had been within a block of the rental car place for a good 5 minutes.

Fortunately, after that ordeal, the acquisition of the rental was uneventful. Although they didn't have a map, so we were forced to navigate with a tourist guide (not an easy thing to do given that the road system is less than intuitive).

Anyway, back to the Italian drivers. After many near death experiences, for us and several scooter drivers, we made it out of Rome and on to the motorway towards Tuscany. This is where the fun really started. Two lane winding roads, 70-80 mph, and drivers willing to pass 3-5 cars at a time resulted in more accidents than we have seen the entire time we have been in Europe. It also seems that the dashed white lines in Italy indicate where the middle of your car should be. What I thought should have been a 2 lane motorway was essentially 3, again at 70-80 mph.

It doesn't stop there either. Apparently it is common practice to pass people (especially us)
when you are driving around blind curves in the mountains of Tuscany (gratuitous picture to the left).

Anyway, enough ranting about the Italian drivers. Gotta go.


Cheers,
Yankee

posted by Yankee @ 3:59 PM