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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Auto Americans

It’s been a great week for George Bush!  You’ll recall that in early 2005, the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon proved that Bush was right.  Well, this week the Israeli bombing of Lebanon also proved that Bush was right!  Though I worry that he may have gone too far in appeasing Iran.  Still, no matter—whatever happens with Israel and Iran and Syria and Gingrich/Kristol’s World War Nine, Bush will have been right.  And let’s not forget how deftly he’s been easing international tensions at the G8 summit!  The man has a spine of steel . . . but very soft hands.  And that’s why we love him.

But we’re not here to talk about world affairs.  Screw world affairs!  This is, as you’ll find in yesterday’s comments, the blog of a “anrcissistic, banal, logorreac, self-obsessed, ill-informed and narrow-minded professor,” so today we’re gonna welcome our four millionth visitor (woo hoo!) by writing about Driving in Europe.

Now, when last we left this self-obsessed etc. blog, I was dealing with gum in my shoe in the Nice airport.  Once I had de-gummed my footwear to my satisfaction, I joined Janet on the line in front of the National/ Alamo counter.  We might have chosen National/ Alamo to indicate our support of the history of American jingoism and imperialism, but in fact, we did so because our previous adventure with Europcar in 2004 was such a complete disaster.  Back then, we’d chosen Europcar for the same reason we’d chosen Air India and EasyJet: it was discount.  And when we arrived in Nice, we learned that thousands of other tourists, most of them British, had chosen Europcar for the same reason!  And after we’d waited an hour at the counter, we boarded a jam-packed shuttle bus, along with thousands of other tourists, that took us to the Europcar lot, where we joined thousands of other tourists who were being served by not one but two Europcar representatives.  Total time from luggage pickup to key-in-ignition, two and a half hours.

This time, we fared much better, being second-timers—and being willing to plunk down another $50 for the week.  The counter line at National/ Alamo was only one hour long, because only five people were in front of us, and the National/ Alamo representative did a fine job scratching the critical clauses of the rental documents onto vellum parchment and then turning them over to scribes for copying.  Jamie waited patiently on a bench, twirling his hair and listening to his iPod.  But most important, we fared much better because this time, we’d rented a car with an automatic transmission.

For some reason, two years ago Janet insisted that you can’t get automatics in Europe, so when she contacted Europcar she asked for a standard that seats four people (with luggage).  This meant, of course, that she would be doing all the driving, since her New York City-born husband never learned to drive a stick.  We got something that looked like a large dustbuster, which would have been fine except that the narrow mountain road that accounts for the 3km between Seillans and our rental house involves a number of hairpin turns on steep grades.  The last of these so flummoxed the dustbuster that Janet, one of the world’s finest drivers of automotive vehicles, was reduced to cursing and flailing as she tried desperately to downshift around the hairpin without losing too much speed for the hill.  After only eighteen or twenty tries, she was successful.  But she had determined that we now had very few options for our little French vacation: (a) stay in the house for the remainder of the week rather than attempt the hill again; (b) keep a large supply of bourbon on hand for her nerves; or (c) return to the airport in Nice, to the mass of humanity at Europcar, and try to negotiate for an automatic.  We chose (c), thereby shooting another half-day of vacation as we struggled with Europcar and its mass of humanity, all of whom seemed to want the same car we wanted.  Europcar informed us that we would pay a steep price for the switch, and demanded to know why we were returning a perfectly fine car.  “Cette voiture,” I ventured, “ne marche pas dans les montagnes.” My French is such that I sometimes wind up saying that I have to dry my horses after I shower, but this time I made myself perfectly clear.  “You mean,” said the Europcar representative in perfect English, fixing me with an icy stare, “that you can’t drive it in the mountains.” And I would have said no, actually I mean that my wife can’t drive it in the mountains, but that would have been unfair, coming from someone who couldn’t drive it out of the parking lot.

So at an exorbitant rate that defeated our entire pro-Europcar rationale, we got ourselves an automatic in 2004.  And as the Driver of Automatics, I was promptly rewarded with the assignment of driving the “scenic route,” first to Monaco in the east and then to Le Lavandou in the south, because Nick thought it would be cool to go to l’Isles d’Hyères.  Monaco via N7 took about three hours, Le Lavandou more than four, though we stopped on the latter journey to let Jamie swim in the Mediterranean (I went in up to my knees.  The water was azure and beautiful and about ten degrees Celsius).

By that point we had reached a Family Crisis.  It was clear that two different travel ideologies were at work: mine, according to which we’d just landed in a beautiful region in southern France and should relax and enjoy the surroundings, and Janet’s/Nick’s, according to which we should attempt to cover as much square kilometerage in one week as our little Dustbuster would allow.  When Janet suggested we go to the cathedral in St-Maximin-la-Ste-Baume so that we could see the skull of Mary Magdalene (and Janet assures me that this had everything to do with her fascination with the Magdalene Cult of weird-ass modernist/ avant-gardists and nothing to do with certain Dan Brown novels), I finally protested.  We saw the damn skull anyway, whosever it was, but not before I’d driven the wrong way down a tiny street in St-Maximin-la-Ste-Baume and gotten the emphatic and deeply shaming finger-wagging tsk-tsk from local pedestrians.  (I made a crafty seventeen-point U-turn in response, all in less than half an hour!) And I was allowed to rest the next day.

This time around, sans Nick, we did more Jamie-friendly things, like renting paddleboats with waterslides in the Lac de St. Cassien and dropping a bunch of Euros at the “Marinepark” in Antibes.  Jamie and I, we are men of simple pleasures.  But we also drove, mostly via mountain roads, to Aix-en-Provence, where we stopped in at Cézanne’s atélier:

image

Hey, who knew it was forbidden to take pictures in Cézanne’s atélier?  Not us!

But our most vivid Driving in Europe experiences were probably our first, when, in June 1999, Janet won a teaching award and decided to spend the cash by getting us a week in a Tuscan villa near Siena.  Janet did all the driving (standard, natch), and I did all the readings of road signs.  Janet is largely deaf in one ear and has no sense of direction whatsoever; I mumble and speak quickly and cannot read Italian.  And yet, after a week of driving under those conditions (along with a 13-year-old Nick, newly prone to motion sickness, for whom we had to stop the car repeatedly on mountain roads to allow him to get out and throw up), we were still married! Amazing but true.

On our last evening in the Tuscan villa, we were greeted by the couple upstairs, who, we believed, owned the place.  “Buona sera,” I said to them on their balcony, only to hear a strange voice reply, “And good evening to you too.” It turned out that the real owner of the villa was an Italian businessman who’d since moved to Canada and was visiting his relatives (our upstairs neighbors) briefly before he returned home in his private jet to . . . wait for it . . . attend game six of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Dallas Stars and the Buffalo Sabres!  Yes, that game, the famous five-hour, triple-overtime “No Goal” game that Sabres diehards (and they do die hard) remember to this day.

“You know Darryl Sittler?” he asked me, two minutes into a conversation that, for me, was getting weirder and better by the second.

“Do I know Hall of Famer and career Maple Leaf scoring leader Darryl Sittler?” I replied.  “Uh, yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“He’s my business partner,” the man said.  Something having to do with car dashboards, if I remember correctly.  Well, we talked hockey for a while, and he filled me in on the Finals, about which I had heard no news since arriving in Italy.  The next morning, our upstairs neighbors, no doubt impressed by our connection to their relative, invited us upstairs as we packed the car for Rome.  We sat down in their kitchen, graciously but fumblingly trying to explain that we had to leave by eight to return the car by noon.  “Ah, sì,” the husband replied, pouring us two glasses of heavy, retsina-like wine.  “Ma se avete amici. . . .” and he began to explain that he and his wife would be willing to rent to us (and our friends) without an intermediary, at about two-thirds the cost of the $1000/week we’d paid.  (Why didn’t we ever follow up on this, I wonder?) Sotto voce, Janet said to me, “I can’t drink this and drive—you’ll have to do it,” and I replied, “I don’t suppose throwing it in the potted plant is an option,” so, while our host was looking elsewhere, I dashed off Janet’s glass while politely continuing to sip my own.

At that point the man’s wife entered the room, asking her husband heatedly what he thought he was doing (that’s as much as I understood) and gesturing at the wine. Whew, I thought, already looped, I’m not going to have to finish this stuff. But it turned out, instead, that she was chastising her husband for serving us wine without biscotti, and so we were treated to two more glasses, thank you very much, and some delicious baked goods before we hit the road.

And that, dear friends and assorted detractors, is the story of how I met a hockey fan and friend of Darryl Sittler in the rolling hills of Siena and was compelled to drink four glasses of wine before 8 AM the next morning.

Tomorrow, Yeats.

Posted by Michael on 07/18 at 09:58 AM
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