By JJ Bowman

Whether to get away from the banality of dorm life or see a great concert hundreds of miles away, students have been enjoying road trips for years.

Sometimes, the only reason to take a road trip is the need for release from the confines of a city and feel fresh air and open road. That couldn’t have been more necessary than in Florence. Although the city delights with its hundreds of historical monuments and beautiful artwork, it also offers a less appetizing side full of dirty streets and car exhaust. After a few weeks in the city, I needed to breathe Tuscany’s purer air.  However, I knew I couldn’t handle another weekend of train travel.

No orientation program nor any book can prepare someone for train travel in Europe – especially one who has lived so luxuriously as a Pepperdine student who spent his freshman year in a dorm with an ocean view. Even before getting onto a train, one first must encounter the station, which are always dirty and quite stressful for any inexperienced traveler.

I had figured that my one refuge at the stations would be the Golden Arches, but unfortunately train-station McDonald’s are usually just an angry customer away from complete chaos. Lines of people with only 20 minutes to catch a train, cleaning workers who appear to hate their jobs about a million times more as cleaning people at McDonald’s in America hate theirs, and 17-year-old cashiers required to speak five languages make the fast food restaurant a place of peril.

Italian trains are equally as horrid as the stations they stop in. On one recent train from Rome to Florence, I sat across from a woman who made farting noises with her lips the entire time she was in the cabin.

This did not look like a medical problem; instead, she just put her lips together and blew to become possibly the most annoying person I have ever come across. In order to end this obscene practice, I had to act equally as disturbing. So I squinted my eyes and stared at her lips until she felt so uncomfortable she and her husband switched cars. I felt vindicated, but disturbed at how trains bring out the absolute worst in me.

I had no desire to see one of Italy’s cleanest treasures by way of train. Fortunately, a friend of mine knew a foreign diplomat with a minivan. Six of us hopped in and set out to partake in one of America’s greatest traditions, a continent away. 

However, we overlooked one glaring fact: Nearly all European cars are equipped with standard transmissions. Our driver, inexperienced with such vehicles to say the least, never relented in his determination to take us to Tuscan wine country; that is, until he stalled out for good about two miles from our villa. As the only one with a history of driving stick shift, I became the unanimous choice to take over.

Despite my comfort behind the wheel, I started becoming nervous. After all, I had no international drivers license, no idea about Italian insurance, and shared a highway with Michael Shumacher wannabes. Alas, my troubles were eased when I was reminded that this car had diplomatic immunity. Thus, we would be undisturbed by local law enforcement except for the more egregious offenses none of us anticipated committing.

So without worries we took a guess at highway signs and made it to southern Tuscany, home of the great Brunello red wine. We walked the old cities of Montelcino and Montelpuciano, saw castles, sipped great wine, and most important, we drove all over, never having to worry about train schedules or reservations. And of course, we also had a designated driver. His name was diplomatic immunity.

February 07, 2002