Driving

My great friends Marion and Jonathan Cronk flew down from England to see us, Becky and Gino and Rich and Rosalinda Struckmeyer, whom they had met a few years ago. We rented a car for the occasion, my first chance to drive for any extended period on this visit.

In general, Italian drivers are - this just in - pretty courteous and competent. Of course, this is the sober, industrial North, and maybe it's a lot crazier round Naples way. The Autostrada - toll road - is well designed, except for one toll plaza where they cleverly put the cash lanes on the opposite side as on the rest of them.

The Cronks flew into Linate (Lih-NOT-tay) airport, on the other side of Milano from us. The main international airport, Malpensa, is halfway to Varese from Milano. Thanks to Gino I took the best route, including the Milano ring road, and got there just in time.

Over the weekend we drove to Lake Como from Varese. I'll write more about Como in another post, but it is a driving challenge. The road is perched between an extremely steep and high mountainside and the lake. It is very, very narrow, and very heavily traveled. We thought summer would be impossible traffic, something like Cape Cod.

We then traversed over to Lake Lugano, also beautiful. The road there was extremely, scarily, narrow. Jon was driving. At one point a bus came around a corner toward us. Jon inched over and we were scraping ivy on the rock wall, but it was all normal. Jon and Marion live in rural Kent and the roads are narrow there as well, so I guess he's used to it. I'm just glad he didn't revert to English left-hand driving under duress.

The cars are smaller in general. Many people drive diesels, because gas is at least double what it costs at home. In fact these are "turbo" diesels and drive really well.

Many of the roads are much narrower than we're used to, and also twistier. It's very funny to turn off a road and into a street that was built hundreds of years ago, with cobblestones, no sidewalks, many jinks. In one little town it takes something like four forwards and reverses to negotiate a corner. Our Italian friend Ezio says that's bad, even for Italy.

Ah, roundabouts, rotaries, traffic circles. Over the past few years our town of Bend has gotten roundabout fever and installed a dozen or more. They're all over Italy, and are usually very helpful. The signage is another story. Before each roundabout there is a schematic, showing towns in the various directions. Sometimes a roundabout might have four or five exits. The signs are small, the names are long, the abbreviations are frequent, the paths between point A and point B are often redundant, and the confusion happens. Plus, individual businesss are allowed to post their own signs, which have a uniform size and color scheme. So at the entrance to a roundabout you might see fifteen or twenty signs.

You see many kinds of car here. I remember in the past that Fiats were everywhere in Italy, but today you don't see that many. (There are some classic Fiat 500s around). You do see Alfa Romeo and Lancia quite a bit, both missing in the States for some years. The rest are German, Japanese, Spanish (SEAT, a Fiat spin-off) and others. There's something called a SmartCar which has no perceivable trunk and must get extremely good gas mileage, because it sure looks unsafe and uncomfortable.

We plan to rent cars again from time to time. Public transportation is fine day-to-day. We took advantage of having the car to do some shopping at an Ikea in Lugano, Switzerland, and a large "hyper" market in Varese. Coming back from Ikea, the Cronks phoned us from on the train from Milano, where they had spent the day chasing pigeons around the Duomo. We were a little concerned about making a rendezvous at their train station, because of heavy traffic and my unfamiliarity with the streets. In the event, they walked out of the station, across a "zebra" crosswalk, around the trunk of our car, and got in. Our timing was absolutely perfect. It's better to be lucky than to be good, right?