European Road Trip!

We thought the train would be our ticket to Europe. We were wrong.

We really liked Rome and weren’t quite ready to leave, but we had an appointment out at the airport we couldn't miss. So we took one last stroll through the Piazza del Popolo before it was time to head out to pick up our car. Yes, that’s right. We were going to drive through Europe.

Anatomy of a Decision

When we first looked into this European travel thing, we considered a Eurail Pass. I think it’s even fair to say we just assumed we’d be traveling through Europe by train. But the more we looked into it, we found that, for this family of four, travel by Eurail was rather expensive and a little prohibitive. It also, obviously left us at the whim of European trains, some of which are not as reliable as others.

We didn’t really want to fly all about Europe, either. Our luggage is too heavy to make the budget airlines a reasonable option. And flitting from country to country seemed to eliminate a lot of the freedom of movement and spirit of exploration that one can enjoy traveling through a series of countries with no border controls.

And then my friend Rob Conery, (another world-traveling father) recommended we try a car instead. So we looked into it and found it was a decent, reasonable option.

Auto France Open Europe

We ended up taking a short-term lease on a  from Auto France’s Peugeot Open Europe program (Update: it’s now called Car-2-Europe). This allowed us to have a brand new (as in 7 kilometers on the odometer new), 6-speed manual, diesel-fueled, fully insured Peugeot 308 SW (the 2014 European Car of the Year) for almost three months at a cost of just over $3,000 USD. It also comes with a great in-dash navigation system and plenty of room to store our luggage (so we won’t have to pile it between the kids in the back seat).

We call her Persephone.

Challenges of Driving through Europe

Now I’ve driven a left-hand drive car on the right side of the road (you know, like it’s done in the United States) and a right-hand-drive car on the left side of the road (like you do in Australia and New Zealand), but I’ve never driven a left-hand drive car on the left side of the road (like I’ll be doing in England and Scotland). So that should be fun.

It’s also a pretty big car (the largest we’ll have driven on the trip — excepting, of course, The Behemoth), so fitting it down some of the narrow streets of old European cities should be interesting as well.

Anticipation of Driving Through Europe

I finally get to drive on the Autobahn, something I’ve wanted to do since I was a young fella.