Driving in Rome is not for the faint of heart.
I won’t go into the full story of how my husband Brian wound up jumping a massive concrete median and found himself driving the wrong way on the light rail track during rush hour in Rome. Let’s just say it was a spot-on re-enactment of a certain scene in “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”, minus the car being on fire.
I was definitely John Candy in the scene. Brian swears he saw the devil horns when he looked over at me. And we definitely missed a head-on collision with a Roman commuter tram thanks to a killer 180° degree turn, with simultaneous airborne median jump back onto the road, merging seamlessly into the parking garage entrance we were looking for.
Funny thing is, nobody really even paid attention. No gawking. No horn blowing. No need.
This is Italy we’re talking about. Driving is its own form of creative expression.
As a professional travel advisor, this sounds like my days right now--bumping along trying to get creative like a Roman in rush hour traffic. If someone were to ask me what I do, I would tell them that I help edit choices to build beautiful trips for busy, successful people and their families who love to travel. But on the flip side, I am also a professional advocate when things don’t go quite according to plan. Like for instance a pandemic.
If you travel enough you learn that even the best-laid plans have unforeseen hiccups. It’s one of the great lessons of the whole thing, and eventually, you learn that it’s ok to do an impromptu 180 to get back going in the right direction. You might find yourself on a different road, but one that leads to the same place, nonetheless.
As much as I would love to tell you otherwise, even the best of us in the business can’t predict when a French workers’ strike will happen any more than we can predict a global shutdown from a tiny microbe. But what I can tell you is that we are there to advocate for our clients when they need the help of a professional the most.
I like to think there was a subtle admiration from the other drivers at the sheer audacity of Brian’s road skills. I have no doubt there was more than one Italian man nodding and slow clapping in his car at this absolutely brazen demonstration of machismo. I know I was.
Too bad we had French tags.
