You can hit the road in Europe
— -- Breaking away from train or tour-guide timetables to explore Europe by car isn't as difficult as you might think.
With a little research into driving laws and customs in the countries you plan to visit and a willingness to do things their way, any competent American driver can cruise the highways of Europe almost as easily as those at home, seeing places that trains and tours don't reach.
We discovered this for the first time in 1996, driving from Trier in westernmost Germany, along the Mosel River to spend the first night in a Rhine River castle outside the small town of Oberwesel. The next day we drove to Quedlinburg, a Medieval gem in the former East Germany, and after two nights there, drove on to Berlin where we returned the car.
My wife, Darlene, and I had fewer problems finding our way across Germany on the well-marked highways than we sometimes have locating places 15 miles away from our home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
We could have made the cross-Germany trip by train, as we had done on trips to other parts of Europe, but it wouldn't have been worth the hassle.
The 70-or-so-mile trip from the Frankfurt Airport to Oberwesel would have required changing trains once. Germany's extensive rail network would have carried us from Oberwesel to Quedlinburg in a day, but with four train changes – a day of hauling our bags on and off trains.
With the car, we wrestled with luggage only at hotels.
Since that first auto trip we've driven maybe 5,000 miles in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, with no thought of returning to rail passes.
If two or more travelers want to escape the cities, renting a car can often cost less than the best rail pass bargain, but since prices of both cars and train tickets change, you should check in advance.
A good place to begin exploring whether you want to drive in Europe is with a look at how the car you'll rent is likely to be different from those in North America:
• Manual, not automatic, transmissions are the norm.
