Off the Grid: When Idaho goes to Europe
My husband is a rule follower. In fact, he is so dedicated to this, he’s chosen a profession dedicated to the following of rules and his favorite observation to make is that something is “not to code.”
It applies to everything from towel-folding technique to the electrical wiring in our funky mountain home.
So I’m not exactly sure why, when we landed in the Edinburgh, Scotland, airport last week, he was rather determined to drive the rental car. His traffic violations are limited to texting me to tell me he’s not going to text me while driving, and once missing a speed limit sign, he rolled into town going a good 4 mph over. I suspected UK driving would instigate an aneurysm before we left the car park.
What I lack in rule following (everything), I make up for in planning (everything). So a small and docile Fiat 500 was waiting for us – something that would only take up half a narrow European lane and not be taken seriously by any of the other vehicles. Also, the spare tire is actually just a pair of roller skates to get you safely to your destination in the same amount of time.
There is a phenomenon at car rental counters that has been studied by the same scientists who study the culinary appeal of ketchup and other occurrences of poorly justified decisions. The male behind the counter and my husband – also a y-chromosome carrier – conferred in a senseless conversation that consisted mostly of grunts and “ooh” sounds until some primal negotiation had occurred and everyone was in agreement that a posh, brand-new, high-powered, low-rider, unscathed, expansive Mercedes was the car we’d be driving. And no thank you, we don’t need additional insurance because that’s a scam. Since Brexit, we probably don’t even have to pay any debts and their money is too pretty to be real anyway.
For 10 minutes, we sat in the car trying to figure out how to turn it on. Then we watched the knees of passers-by while fumbling with our navigation system like toddlers on a Speak & Spell. Had the latter been an intelligence test, both of us would have been shipped off to a hotel for the catatonic. Being jet-lagged to what felt like the last century, we would have not been able to protest.
It is important in life that we get out of our comfort zone once in a while, try things we’ve never tried, maybe even find our adrenaline edge. But by this I mean sky diving or bungee jumping off an unreliable bridge, not sitting in the passenger seat while your sleep-deprived husband careens down a motorway and does laps on roundabouts to the meep-meep of the cute foreign cars and shaking fists.
Road etiquette was out the window – we were just driving to survive. We drove our way into the heart of Edinburgh where we quickly got lost and, as traditionally American as possible, found ourselves ignoring taxi and bus lane rules and panicking our way through pedestrian zones – me white-faced and nauseous, my husband white-knuckled and neurotic. He’d broken at least 40 rules in as many minutes. I would have thought it liberating, but I think he only liberated himself of bladder control.
I’m not sure when it would have been appropriate to mention that I lived in Ireland for several years, owned a car and was well-versed in the ways of roundabouts and double-deckers. By then it seemed a little too late to be helpful and I did not want to discourage Charlie’s hard-won progress. I just kept chirping, “You’re doing so good, honey!” because that sounded a lot more encouraging than, “This isn’t how I thought I’d die.”
Just as we were getting ready to leave that fancy car running on a dodgy corner and claim it stolen, we flew past our hotel and cried out like sailors who had just seen land. Unfortunately, it was on the wrong side of the street, so we had to make 30 left turns to find our way back to it. To our knowledge, we arrived without causing a single accident.
Out of breath and trembling, we stumbled into a lobby with an atmosphere exactly as I imagine heaven feels like. All the mayhem of the outside noise was replaced with calm classical music. Every light was soft and surrounded by crystal, floors were marble, fixtures gold. People seemed genuinely happy to see us. A dapper gentleman with a brogue and a plaid suit offered to trade our keys for a glass of champagne. Our crisis somehow ended as abruptly as it began.
Before we took a sip, we checked behind ourselves to make sure those were just rotating doors and not actually the pearly gates. Anyway, had it been heaven, they would have just handed over the whole bottle.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com