Driving in Europe

Lier, Belgium

I've always had an interesting in driving, all kinds of vehicles in all kinds of ways, and driving in Europe is an interesting experience.  Sure different parts of the States have different intersection layouts, parking layouts and speed limits from each other, but at least the caution signs are familiar and the text is always in English. Arriving here even the lane lines on the road are unfamiliar and street signs are indecipherable. Our GPS has been doing a great job with lane guidance and frequent re-routes, but it's a little bit stressful making your way through tiny city streets that are randomly closed for construction or because of a festival.

Antwerp, Belgium

Every town and city in Belgium was having a festival last weekend, which made reaching downtown destinations (or finding parking near them anyways) a challenge. Belgians are very good at keeping to the right on the highway unless they are passing, but the comparison with driving on the German Autobahn is a little bit different. When there is no speed limit on the highway and everybody has to get out of the way of the very fast cars, they are very quick to move aside, and it seems to work very well.  We very rarely even saw brake light ahead of us, and most of the traffic seemed to move along very smoothly.  We haven't seen a single accident on any of the roads here yet and the attention that it requires to change lanes constantly to pass and be passed seems to me that it would keep everyone on their toes and reduce "surprises" that tend to cause accidents.

My track rental - Deceptively quick when you really put your foot down

It's a lot of fun when you get to be one of those fairly fast cars that people are moving aside for.  Today I drove two cars pretty fast.  I found out that our rental Volvo V60 (diesel) would do 185 kph (115 mph) with the throttle wide open on a long, straight, downhill stretch of the Autobahn, and I managed to get a track-rental VW Polo GTI up to 220 kph (135 mph) on the fastest part of the Nurburgring (the car had more room to go, I just couldn't get any more speed out of it in the room available).  Nurburgring is much more about technique and running a good line than going super fast, especially when the track is wet like it was today. At 13 miles long and with 70+ corners it is widely considered one of, if not the most, technically challenging race tracks in the world.  It's also a public road during the time it's open so there are all kinds of other vehicles, some going very, very fast, and others that you have to scratch your head about.

Even campers can drive a lap on Nurburgring

One of the things that you are warned against, especially as a driver new to Nurburgring, is running a timer or trying to set (and improve) lap times, so while I didn't run a timer, I did record videos of my laps just to see how my lap times went afterwards.  I didn't want to push it too much, but I wanted to have fun and do the best laps I could.  My first lap, with Amanda in the car, I did a leisurely 14:04. My second lap, driving alone, I worked to speed it up and cut a better line and got down to 12:03. For the third lap I managed to get Amanda back in the car again and pulled off a time of 11:09. My final lap (alone again) I ended up down at 10:24.  I understand a professional driver should be able to get the same car around the track in 8:40, and even though I would never be competitive at my pace, I feel like I did some very nice work considering I've never driven on a track at all before today (unless go-karting counts) but I think all the practice I did playing the track on computer games to memorize the corners paid off.