I know some of you were wondering how we were going to survive a 12-hour or more trip to Italy with two young children. To save you the suspense, I’ll summarize our day. According to the mapping program we have on our laptop, the trip from Neidereschach, Germany to Paestum, Italy takes about 12 hours and 8 minutes, including 30-minute breaks every 4 hours. This means that by leaving at 5:30AM, we should arrive in Paestum by about 5:38PM, give or take.

We checked into the hotel at 10:30 PM, having just arrived in Paestum.

Before I start talking about what went wrong, I’d like to point out that the trip was not that bad, it was just long. We deliberately set up our vacation so that we would have our longest driving day on the first day, so the good news is that it is behind us now. Also, the kids were surprisingly good, even though we kept them in the car for 17 hours. We didn’t even have to resort to letting them watch DVDs on the laptop either. We were very impressed.

Our planned route from Germany to Paestum, Italy. The map was in German because our mapping program is in German. Strangely enough, when you buy computer programs in Germany, they are not in English!

[Update: but Google maps is in english, though!]
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Here’s the play-by-play of our trip:

4:45AM: The alarm goes off, just as scheduled. Sandi says she heard the alarm in her dreams before she realized it was really going off. I got up to turn it off, forced myself not to get back into bed, and thus our day started.

5:15AM: We bring the kids down to the car, both of whom wake up. Carissa takes an interest in watching the sunrise, after I point out the light spot in the sky where dawn is starting to happen.

5:30AM: We’re on the road, the adventure begins. Knowing that we would probably face a lot of heavy traffic and uncertain road conditions, it seemed to make sense to go as far as possible before everyone else woke up.

6:10AM: We exit Germany in record time. It helps to be able to put the pedal to the floor when there’s no one blocking your way.

7:00AM: We make our first wrong turn. Both of the kids have gone back to sleep.

7:10AM: We are back on track, but we gave up the time we made up on the Autobahn in Germany.

7:20AM: The road we are supposed to take suddenly ends. We are routed off the road onto a side road with no obvious instructions about how to get back on.

8:30AM: We rejoin the Autobahn 60km south. The side trip was beautiful, but we covered the distance in about twice the time the highway would have taken. We are now 30 minutes behind schedule.

9:30AM: We drive through the 17km long Gotthard Tunnel. Unfortunately, the going is slow through this entire region, and by the time we make it to the border, we are more than an hour behind.

10:15AM: We arrive at the border between Switzerland and Italy. Actually, this is when we arrived at the end of the line waiting to cross the border. When we first came to a complete stop, I could see a sign in the distance that said the border crossing was 7000 meters ahead.

In a scenario that would repeat itself all day, we found that “lines” or “queues” or “basic civility” are somewhat a foreign concept to the Italians. Even worse, Italian civil service personnel don’t seem to have any particular interest in doing their jobs at all, much less in an efficient manner.

Keep in mind that the border crossing between Switzerland and Italy is more or less a formality these days. Both sides keep the operation going because Switzerland has refused so far to join the European Union. Between Germany and Switzerland, for example, there are customs and immigration officials posted at the border, but their job is usually just to wave you through as fast as possible. Between Switzerland and Italy, the procedure is roughly the same—if the Italian border patrol personnel can be bothered to wave their hands.

The person operating the station at the front of the line we were in was reading something that looked like a newspaper, and we had to wait for him to look up before we could proceed, which took about 20 seconds. When you multiply that time by the approximately 40 billion cars that were also trying to cross at that time, you can see that we are lucky that we weren’t still sitting there on the morning I need to return to work.

10:40AM: We (finally) enter Italy. Our mapping program had estimated our arrival at about 9:00. We are already 1 hour and 40 minutes behind schedule.

11:45AM: After passing through Milan unscathed, we hit the first of several major traffic jams outside of Bologne.

1:45PM: We finally pass through Bolonge. We’re now more than 3 hours off schedule.

3:00PM: We stop for lunch at one of the little “Autogrill” rest stops that are common on Italian toll roads. This was actually the second stop we made after the traffic jam, but the first rest stop was so packed with people (who also just survived the traffic jam) that Unfortunately, we can’t figure out how to order lunch from the grill, the cafeteria will take too long, and the native Italians have already developed a knack for pushing around anyone who takes too long. So we give up, buy some snacks, and return to the road, now even further behind.

4:00PM: We stop at an Autogrill rest stop that contains a Burger King. One Whopper meal and 2 orders of Popcorn Chicken later, we are on the road, happier than before. We have an expression in this family whenever we see a McDonald’s or Burger King in Europe: “We’re saved!”

5:30PM: We drive through Rome. This is when we are supposed to be arriving at our destination, but we are still 5 hours away now. We’ve been slowly falling behind at this point, but not due to any particular problems. Traffic is just heavy, and sometimes slow. On the northbound route on the other side of the median, we have seen multiple traffic jams stretching several kilometers each, especially around Florence. I’m not looking forward to driving that route home.

8:45PM: We finally exit the A1 toll road in Napoli. We first entered the road in Milan, received a ticket showing that was our entry point, and then paid a toll of € 38.75 to exit at the other end.

9:15PM: Somewhere near Salerno, it starts to rain. It is dark now, the road we are on seems to be permanently under construction, and Italian drivers are insane. We’ve got the GPS on, though, and we can tell we are making progress in the right direction.

10:00PM: We finally arrive in Paestum, the town where our hotel is located. The GPS is no longer useful since we don’t have an exact location for the hotel. We follow the signs to the hotel, but one of the turns isn’t clear. There are several possible choices for the turn, and all of them seem to lead into, um, bad neighborhoods.

10:30PM: We finally guess the right set of turns and arrive at the Hotel Le Palme.

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