Not many of you have had the honor to be a passenger in a car that I was driving. You should probably be thankful for that. It's not necessarily that I'm a BAD driver, but in my defense, I do only drive a few times a year and it takes me some time to get back into the swing of things. The last time I was behind a wheel of a car was when I went back to Columbus for Lisa and Jeff's wedding over Memorial Day. You can bet that at that point in time I didn't think the next time I would be driving would be in Skopje. So needless to say, the driving legs of my journey were quite an experience.
There are very few automatic cars in Europe it seems, which is a shame as I certainly cannot drive a stick. That said, Haley and I had a beauty of a car while we were in Greece, we called her "Kim". Sometimes Kim didn't want to start moving if we'd been stopped and you could have the gas all the way down...this made for some annoyed people behind us. But in the end, Kim did get us from A to B.
The hardest thing about driving in Skopje was the fact that there were no street signs...anywhere. This made following our Mapquest directions very challenging. Luckily, my iPhone has a trusty compass so we knew as long as we were driving SE, we would eventually hit Greece! iPhone saves the day again! In fact, even the locals didn't seem to know where we were as when we asked at the toll booth which road we were on (and by asking, I mean acting out everything trying to get him to understand us), we were told it was the Autobahn...this was not helpful. But luckily not long after that we started seeing signs for the European Union and realized we were on the right track!
We were happy to make it to Greece, but I must say - I'm not really sure there are any driving rules in Greece. People seemed to just make up their own lanes and drive incredibly fast. I was not a fan of this. Thankfully, we were able to make it to our hotel in one piece, after multiple detours and getting lost a few times in the city.
The part I was most nervous about was the drive back to Skopje, particularly as I was leaving Haley in Greece and wouldn't have a navigator! Luckily, there really is just one main road, so I was able to find my way and only got lost once! There were some beautiful views on the drive back at least:
And then of course, once back in Skopje some amazing automobiles:
I also rented a car in Bologna to drive and meet friends in Forte Dei Marmi. I've often seen these types of cars, but never really thought that I would ever be behind the wheel of one. The only real bright side was that it had red interior, which made me feel fierce :)
Lessons learned:
(1) ALWAYS get a GPS when driving in a foreign country
(2) Speed limits in Europe appear to be more of suggestions than rules
