Best Laid Plans

The Genesis of a Poorly Crafted Plan: 

(otherwise known as How the Map of Europe Fools Americans)

One rainy Saturday morning your power goes out and so, instead of scrubbing the mold from between the shower tiles or cleaning out the refrigerator, you plop down in your living room and begin browsing through an atlas of the world.  You might prefer to open a cooking or fishing magazine but the atlas will provide you with a better story when your spouse comes in and demands to know why you are doing  nothing more productive than occupying space on the furniture.  After 10 minutes of contemplating the exports of Peru and Bolivia you stumble over the map of Europe.  After a while you find yourself thinking that it looks an awful lot like a bowl of jelly beans; each little country with its own color and flavor, mixed together in a cheerful cluster. From your comfortable spot on the couch, examining a one-dimensional piece of paper, it sure seems like traveling through Europe could be as easy as dipping your hand into a candy bowl and sampling half dozen pieces. You will start with your favorites like cherry (France) and lemon (Spain) and then, because its right there, you figure its easy enough to go for grape (Czech Republic) and orange (Switzerland). So it seems, as you walk your fingers over the boot that is Italy and the tiny spot that is the Netherlands, that seeing all of these places in the span of, oh, say a week or so, should be completely do-able. 

After hearing your plans, some of your friends try to advise you to pick one area, fly in and really saturate yourself with that culture and scenery. But they are the sort of folks who do things like clean the leaves out of their gutters before a heavy rain so should you really be taking their advice? Hardly. Besides, you have heard of people who have hitchhiked through Europe and it took them a whole summer just to see half a dozen countries. Your plan is to go by car which means you can cover much more ground in less time. "Listen", you tell your friends, "I once drove for 12 hours from Amarillo to the Gulf and I never left the state of Texas. If I spent 12 hours driving in Europe, I could have visited 3 or 4 countries!"  Clearly you have convinced (and impressed) them because thereafter they no longer will speak with you on this subject. And every time you glance at that map, you know that this whole thing is going to be as easy as eating candy from a candy bowl.

However, its going to take some weeks to get your passport so while you wait for the U.S. government to mail that precious dark blue notebook, let's go over the nuts and bolts of the driving bit.

The American's Guide to the European Road Trip

First: There is some math involved here. I'm just warning you up front. Also, you need to take a brief personality test (you can only fail if you have no personality in which case you are not likely to be reading this blog, you are likely to be reading InStyle magazine and trying to emulate Paris Hilton).

Question #1 When not at a fancy restaurant do you still eat with your fork tines turned down?

Question #2 Does the thought of carrying a man purse not make you want to drop and do push-ups?

If you answered yes to both questions, feel free to use the metric system for the calculations. For everyone else, stick with measuring everything in miles and feet. (If you do not know what fork tines are and if the words “man-purse” make you want to shoot at empty beer cans, you might want to question why you would want to visit Europe in the first place.)

Here comes the math so climb the dusty attic of your brain, sweep past the long-forgotten dates of the Spanish-American war, duck under the rules for when its allowable to use a split infinitive (is it ever?) and brush off how to figure percentages. Ready? Let's go

Start with listing all of the cities you would like to visit. (limit yourself to 32 or so) Add up the distances and then divide that total by the average kilometer per hour you imagine you can safely travel while driving in a country in which you cannot read any of the road signs. See how easy this is? You're doing great.

Now you know you're going to get lost at least once so take your total and multiply it by 5.7 to give yourself the adjusted time. If you think this is too high, you should be aware that there is something called a round-about which is the staple of the European roadway. Think you won't encounter one? Sure, not if you don't leave the airport.

If you're going to Germany or Austria, subtract 1.6% for traveling on the autoban but for every former Soviet bloc country you plan to drive through, add 61.23% . This is to compensate for bad roads and the fact that you will spend approximately 33.7% of your time behind a horse drawn wagon which will be traveling at 0.98 kmph and it will take you, on average, 4.07 km to pass each of these wagons. If you will be going in May, add an additional .05%. Don't ask why, its too complicated to explain, just do it.

Good news: if you will be driving in a Western European made car, you can simply stop here. You have your total travel time. Now you can cancel the road trip and start looking for tour bus packages.

Bad news: if you are driving in an Eastern-European made car (for example a Dacia) that was manufactured any time before October of 2010 and/or has greater than 521 km on the odometer, you must take your original figure and multiply it by 82 for rainy days and 73.2 for all other types of weather.  There is also a discomfort factor with the Eastern European cars but that has its own algorithm and requires a graphing calculator so I'm omitting it unless its specifically requested.

Please note that there is a rare but distinct possibility that you will come up with a number for the total driving hours that actually exceeds the total hours of your entire vacation.  If this happens, do not panic. Follow the example of those who have experienced this same phenomenon in the past and simply burn your passport and move to Fresno.