The voyage home

I forgot to elaborate on my description of our drive home. We had a couple of interesting obstacles.

The first was in Italy. A couple of hours out of Venice, before we'd gotten to Milan, all traffic on the freeway came to a dead stop. We weren't moving at all. That's unusual, so we figured that something was wrong. Sure enough, after a few minutes, a police car and a fire engine came past us on the side of the freeway. All of us were out of our cars and walking around, and at least one guy took the opportunity to relieve himself at the side of the road. (Europeans tend to be less uptight about things like than Americans, and Italians tend to be less uptight than other Europeans.) We finally got moving after 45 minutes, and as we drove past the trouble spot, we could see that it had been a car fire that bascially left just the charred shell of a car. It must have been pretty spectacular at the time. We didn't see any signs that anyone had been hurt, but we're not sure.

The next hangup came as we were approaching the Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland. That's a very long tunnel through the Alps that links the German and Italian parts of Switzerland. When it was built, it was the longest road tunnel in the world. Without that tunnel, you either have to go a couple of hours out of the way, or you have to take one of those scary Swiss mountain passes that's full of hairpin turns and is only open in the summer. I've heard of waits as long as three hours, but it only took us an hour to get through.

So that's how a five-hour drive stretched into something a bit longer.