English Road Trippers

On Thursday night I went to meet some friends of Florian who were in Rome for the night. The reason for their short visit was that they had driven from London to Rome in two days and had to turn around to catch a ferry on Sunday night. Florian's friend, Joe Stenning, who I met over the summer when we went to the Amalfi Coast for a weekend, was recently dumped by his girlfriend of five years and decided that the best way to clear his head would be to hop in the car and drive to Rome, so he convinced a friend to tag along and they hit the road. They drove for twelve hours the first day, Wednesday, and made it to Milan, where another friend of theirs is working. Thursday morning they had lunch in Florence and then dinner in Rome. They then left Friday morning to head to Monaco for Friday night, then Paris for Saturday night and then to the ferry from Callais on Sunday. I met them at Campo de' Fiori after I got off work at nine and had a few beers before I had to call it a night.

I made the point that I was very jealous how easy it was for them to pick up and drive through four different countries on a whim and this sparked a long discussion of road trips in general. Joe's older brother is currently driving across America in a rented Corvette with his girlfriend. While I would very much like to a do a long road trip in the States, the thing I would look forward to the least would be the long, straight roads that dissect the middle of the country and are surrounded by nothing but cornfields for hundreds of miles. But, to the Englishmen, this was exactly what they wanted to see, massive open spaces. Not that they didn't enjoy their roadtrip through the French countryside, the Swiss Alps and the rolling hills of Tuscany, but the envy in Joe's voice when talking about his brother's trip made it obivous he would rather be behind the wheel of an American muscle car cruising along I-80.