On the Road

So at the time of this writing, I'm sitting in the car on the way to Rome. We woke up at about 3am to avoid the traffic, and so far the drive has been somewhat, well, boring, although I guess I should have expected that. Since half of the drive so far has been me sleeping, I can't tell very many stories about what happened on the way, but I did have the very strange experience of falling asleep in France and waking up in Italy: suddenly, upon waking up, all of the signs looked different and the spelling took on the standard "bouncy words" that comprised Italian. It didn't really fully register until we went to the gas station, and we got to actually hear the language. Unfortunately, I came to a realization that I was now in a foreign country where I couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. While this was true, I absolutely loved listening to it. For some reason, the Italians speak very quickly and then emphasize the last two or three syllables of their sentence, which I always found myself anxiously anticipating whenever I heard one of them talk.

The French side of the journey was rather, well, French. For some reason, we came up to a speed camera only 2 km/h over the speed limit (that's slightly over 1 mi/h) and we were greeted by a blinding flash. Keep in mind that this was at 3:45 in the morning, so a flash that bright leaves us somewhat visually impaired for the next 15 seconds or so: I'm amazed that there hasn't been a lawsuit over something like that. Of course, we felt pretty crummy for the next 10 minutes or so, but I honestly think that being stopped by a Gendarme would have been even worse (the French have 3 different police forces: the municipal police, the national police, and the Gendarmerie, which supervises the highways and is militarized so that they'll wake up any time due to the fact that they're sworn to service). Honestly, I wasn't driving, but I'm pretty sure that the adrenaline levels of getting caught by a speed camera is far inferior compared to being pulled over by a policeman. There were literally 5 speed cameras during the next kilometer, which was quite annoying thanks to the built-in speed camera alarm on our GPS that essentially yells at you and prevents any sleep whatsoever.

At the moment, we've knocked 7 hours and 20 minutes off of our journey, and we still have another 2h40 to go. At least the countryside (and the language) is beautiful. I'll post another one of these once we make it to the hotel and collapse from sheer exhaustion. Unless, of course, my crazy mother decides to go somewhere. In that case, I ask you all to pray for me.