An American Driving in Europe, [part 1]

Part 1: Know before you go…

If you have the opportunity to road-trip around Europe, we can highly recommend it. Driving through Europe on your own is an amazing way to see and experience all that Europe has to offer in a way most people won’t ever know. There’s an intimacy you simply can’t get otherwise.

We were lucky enough to experience this first hand by spending 23 days on the road traveling through all of the northern Eu countries. We learned a few things along the way. The first thing to know is that it’s not as daunting as you’d expect it to be. GPS, and especially CarPlay makes driving an order of magnitude easier than I imagine it must have been before GPS. Rather than trying to look for street names I can’t pronounce or read, I simply drive the blue line. Even EU roundabouts are simple (except in Brussels). That said, there are some gotchas that take a little getting used to. I wish I knew all this when we arrived. There’s so much information that I’ve split this into multiple parts to not completely overwhelm.

Like most parts of the world, cars and driving are treated very differently from what we are accustomed to in the US. A driver’s license is mandatory in most of the US, mainly due to our poor public transportation and the lack of walkability / bike-ability in our cities. On the plus side, because cars and driving are such a big part of American living and the American economy, driving requirements are few and mostly easy to satisfy. As well, our gas is some of the cheapest in the world.

To think about the US and cars in the context of the rest of the world, we have about 4.5% of the world’s population, but nearly 20% of the world’s cars. In the US, there are more registered cars than there are drivers.

Cars are not required for most people in Europe, and in many cases are a superfluous burden. Getting a drivers license is difficult, cars are more expensive, parking is near impossible, and gas is priced like it was milked from an endangered Madagascan Lemur. In most urban areas, biking or public transportation is much faster than driving, and that doesn’t consider parking. In Amsterdam city limits, the speed limits are the same for cars and bikes: 25km (~15mph), and bikes always have the right of way.

Even with all that, we brought a car with us to live in Europe so we could do some Top Gear level road-trips, but for most people, renting a car will be the best option.

A couple things to know before you go…

Most countries will allow you to drive with a US driver license for 90 days, but not all. For many countries you’ll need an international driver license… technically. There’s some debate if you really need an intl driver license, but if something VERY BAD happens, you are driving illegally by the letter of the law. I did have an instance where an agency in Italy would not rent me a Ferrari because I did not have an Intl license. After a little research, I opted to ignore the Intl license and use my US license, and ultimately get a Dutch license.

Most car rental companies I’ve seen restrict where they will allow their cars to go. For instance, most western EU car rentals are forbidden from traveling to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This restriction has nothing to do with crime, but is suspected to be due to the constant threat of a Russian invasion. This is sad being that these three countries are some of the least explored, with some of the greatest things to see.

All continental EU countries drive on the right side of the road. This is especially nice for us Americans. Only the UK, Malta, and Cypress drive on the left. Driving on the left side of the road isn’t too bad with a little practice… so long as you have a car with the steering on the right. Before our trip is over, we will be driving our car (steering on the left) to the UK. This should be interesting!

Credit cards are problematic on EU roadtrips. They work everywhere in tourist areas throughout Europe, but oftentimes not anywhere else. We’ve already written about how many stores in Amsterdam don’t accept US cards or cash and require Dutch debit cards. Well… the same is true elsewhere in Europe. Many gas stations between cities would not take our US cards. Luckily our Dutch debit cards worked everywhere. For those without a dutch debit card, I’d recommend always carrying cash, but even this is problematic in countries not on the Euro. Just something to be aware of. We never had to pay cash, but we always had ~€300 just in case (a full tank in the Cayenne was as high as €220).

Similar to credit cards, language can also be an issue when in between large cities. Although all of the larger cities we traveled to in Northern Europe have many English speakers, we ran into a few cases where no one spoke English when we would stop for gas or food. Google Translate is an incredible piece of tech that allows you to read another language, and translate what you want to say. We used Google Translate daily on our trip. If you plan to go way off the beaten path where you’re not sure there’s cell signal for Inet (think: remote Coast Guard station on the Finnish - Russian border, you can download a language ahead of time to be used offline.

With all of this, you know most of what you’d need to know ahead of time. The next installment will cover things to know once you're Hitting the road.