I wonder if people realise that you get lazier as you get older. I have been meaning to write on my European adventure for a quite a while now even planned on making it a journal with interesting tit bits. The only accomplishment has been to write it over and over inside my head and never put it down on either physical or electronic paper. All those ideas for the journal with daily information have now been boiled down to this on post, if I can finish it. So here it is after 5300 Kilometers, 12 countries (Germany, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Austria, Italy, Monaco, France, Spain, Andorra, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg) and countless cities in 11 days.

At the outset let me state that driving through 12 countries in less than 12 days is sheer madness and is not fun unless of course you are crazy yourself (an attribute that I can claim to an extent). It also boils down to what you want to see and what motivates you. I am not a big fan of old medieval architecture, though I do get awed by it every now and then. I wanted to just tick certain countries off my bucket list and this was a good chance for me to do it. I did want to see the Eiffel tower and the streets of venice, other than that I just wanted to add some countries to the “been there” list. Unless you are driving you wouldn’t be in Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra or Luxembourg. For the uninformed, those are principalities in western Europe, smaller than most large cities. Of the four Monaco is worth visiting, mostly to see the most interesting F1 track. They also tend to be cheaper compared to the rest of Europe, but not the US of A.

Driving in Europe is definitely easier than driving in the East but not as easy as in the US of A. Everything from the roads to signposts, are inferior to the US and I don’t even want to talk about the GPS. The one that came with my car only showed me the correct location of the hotel on two occasions. A couple of times even the cities that I was supposed to stay was available in the GPS. The fact that there are no street signs in most of europe is compounded by the fact that there are few people on the streets late at night, unlike India where the pedestrians are the only source of street information. It was almost a daily ritual for us to spend more than an hour trying to find the hostel each night. The worst was either Italy where we finally had to settle for a expensive hotel because the hostel was supposed to be on a mountain that did not exist or Luxembourg where we spent over two hours to find the castle hostel. Though it was these “searches” that made the trip interesting and adventurous; that and the people who refused to acknowledge English.

Driving through Europe was an experience in itself, because of all the different landscapes that we drove through. Be it the tunnel filled mountains of Austria or the coastal French Riviera along Nice and Monaco. Throw in some snow, rain and sunshine and you have all the different weather rolled into a single trip.

Switzerland