Long European Drive into Night

On a Wednesday night we left Milan. It was really a Tuesday morning at about 2 am. We had to be in Paris by sometime the next morning to exchange our rental car with a new one. We had put about 8000 kilometers on that little car. I was going to miss our little 2-door VW Up! I hadn't even named it so I didn't get too attached. It didn't even have cruise control. But first we had to get to Paris. Kitz took the first few hours of the night while I slept. Since I was the navigator, I told her to wake me up at a town before we changed our course. I woke up before that when she stopped at a small Italian Alpenhorn town to find a 24 hour ATM that would take her card before we got to the Mont Blanc tunnel. We had taken the Frejus tunnel to get to Italy but we would take Mont Blanc to get back. We were in the mountains when I woke up though I could not clearly see them. When we drove through the Swiss Alps, we could clearly see the stark, green mountains resplendently bowing over us. But that was during the day. The French Alps during twilight slowly faded into dark shapes on all sides as we drove to Italy. I love driving in the night for this mysterious moonscape. There are fewer vehicles and we were able to see lit castles perched on the sides of the mountain, sometimes almost right above us. These valleys we sped through seemed enchanted when we were the only car in sight. Like an historic amusement park ride, we were shown small towns, crosses, chapels, and castles either lit or in vague outline from the streetlamps. Then came the Mont Blanc tunnel, followed by Mont Blanc lit by moonlight. Soon I took over driving so that Kitz could sleep. I had my iPod with the directions and things to listen to as I drove through the rest of the night and rising sun showing France.

I love the quietness of cross-country driving during dawn wether it is in Wyoming, Utah, California, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Wisconsin, or France. I love to watch how the color of the light slowly changes as it washes the land. The land keeps changing until the light is clear but the changes are all to swiftly moving to capture or define. The fields change from lavender to peach and finally to grass with all the colors in between. As an echo the sky also slowly transformed from secretive and warm night to clear day as all the pastels in the world were thrown out into the brightest of sun and shaken through the painted air.

Kitz slept and I used my iPod to keep me driving to Paris. As more cars joined the highway and the day was completely clear, there was no more magic, just driving to Paris. Kitz woke up and took the wheel to drive to the Europcar outside Gare de Lyon. We emptied many things from the car and back into our backpacks. Then we went and saw all the fine people at the Europcar desk. Ibrahim took care of our car rental again and upgraded us to a car with a nav system and cruise control. This really raised our spirits as we began the long drive to Prague. Kitz got us out of Paris and close to the edge of France then she slept while I drove us across Germany to the Czech Republic. While I really did like driving on the autobahn, it did involve lots of speeding up and slowing down. There were certain zones where there were speed limits and only two lanes with slow trucks and Cars going 200 km/hr. But it was still nice to not have tolls. I'm really hoping Germany will be added to Italy and France ad a country we do not get sent tickets from. I'm sure we will get some from Switzerland, the rest I can just pray not to get tickets from. Because we are hiring the car, the tickets may take many months to be mailed to my US address. I am not looking forward to that. In addition to vignettes, there are speed cameras and you are only allowed about 2 km/hr over the speed limit in Switzerland before you get a speeding ticket according to the Internet. So around Christmas or a little after, I may be getting presents from Europe.

So we left the countries where I understand the language: Germany and France and returned to a country where everything is a mystery. Italian and Czech have very little familiarity to me which is humbling. But we made our way to Praha with some diacritical marks, or at least the outlying town of Ricany with an upside-down tent over the c. My iPod doesn't have these marks which has only ever bothered me when trying to spell Zizek with two upside down tents over the z's. But we made it to Ricany and then struggled to find the hostel. We finally did find the hostel and it reminded Kitz of Russia and Eastern European buildings but it was cleaner on the inside. She somehow communicated in Russian with the lady to check in and we finally got to sleep after 17 hours of driving and this threadbare but homey hostel seemed like heaven.