Did you ever wonder what you’d do if you were in an ancient walled hill town, like Cortona, it’s after midnight following a fantastic meal that includes pasta with black truffles, you’re happy to be alive, get in your car and the next thing you careen over several massive stone steps and become wedged at 45 degree angle between them?
People, quite rightly, drive small cars in Europe. They drive them like maniacs at a 130 km a minute, but they’re small…or tiny even. We required a big car with lots of trunk space. Jim and I haven’t checked a bag in 20 years. But we’re going for three months with two dogs and they count as one of two carry ons! So we couldn’t even lift two of our suitcases that had to be checked. So when we got to Paris we had no choice but to rent a BMW SUV. The insurance was so expensive it would’ve been the equivalent of purchasing a Prius in the States, so we passed, deciding to rely on the insurance provided by the credit card we were using to pay for the car. We’re experienced European drivers! Why would we need extra insurance? The last words the French rental agent said, in the only fluent English he spoke, “if anything happens to the car you must purchase the car.”
Those words repeated in my ears as I watched the following event unfold. I “watched” from a distance contemplating how we were 1) going to pay for the car; 2) what would we do with the car we’d own in Italy? We had trouble finding a place to store our cars in LA for three months?!