But, I guess that is just the American in me talking. None of that would have been open to me without a car. What will I remember? Watching the sunset over Andalusia from an abandoned monastery, sharing a meal with some migrant workers on an olive orchard in Tuscany, giving Goran and his hobbled sheep a ride and subsequently living with him for a week on his lavender farm in Croatia. Standing in a mob in Dubrovnik while 'Game of Thrones' tours pass. Standing in a mob in Rome looking at the Vatican.

You know what I'm not going to remember? Standing in a mob waiting for a train in Cinque Terre. On top of that, every one of my least favorite experiences was in a place that was highly accessible to public transit, and mobbed with tourists. Literally every one of my favorite experiences/places of the trip was completely inaccessible through public transit, and honestly I would not have even found those places or people if I wasn't driving around aimlessly. Probably 15 times, people lectured me under the guise of a question 'Why did you rent a car? Why not just take trains?', and maybe 10 times 'That's so American'.īut, I'm glad I did. I just got back from a 3 month European road trip, basically following the Med coast from Gibraltar to Greece. Thanks for the fun game and for bringing back some memories.įunny. Fascinating vignettes of the culture across the continent. We picked up one called The Last American Hitchhiker by Mark Kneeskern, that we read aloud to each other during journeys. There are a bunch of books about hitchhiking across America. One of the songs we’ve used is, aptly, America by Simon and Garfunkel. Whenever we go on trips, we will pick a song and listen to it over and over, and then when we hear it later, it helps the memories come back. We’ve traveled to many places in the world, and there are of course countless great people and sights, but all that really helped provide perspective on just how much we have available to us just in North America: Canada, the US and Mexico contain an incredibly diverse set of landscapes and cultures. Would love to retrace some of these routes on a bicycle one day.

My wife and I have driven all over the eastern seaboard, to the west coast, the southern tip of Texas, and to Alaska.

Simon garfunkel zip