TL-DR: it’s so boring!
The main problem is that when the scenery around is nice, you still have to keep your eyes on the road and can’t exactly stop to take pictures when you want.
Then there are those stretches like the 4 and a half hours I had to drive yesterday to get from Detroit to Chicago that seemed to never want to end.
Luckily I had downloaded a few hours worth of episodes of the amazingly funny “My dad wrote a porno” podcast to keep me entertained, but in general I was quite happy to finally spot Chicago’s skyline appear at last… Until I saw the kind of traffic I was heading into. Waze continuously changing its mind on the best route to the Hertz garage didn’t exactly help making the situation relaxing.
To top it off, when I got roughly one block away from my final destination, the skies opened and a tropical monsoon unleashed on the city (another sign?).
In the end, it all worked out OK though, as I managed to make it to the garage 15 minutes before they closed, and instead of walking the 5 blocks left to my hotel, I spent 20 minutes in more traffic (but with my head dry) in an Uber ride 😃.
A few considerations about my roadtrip experience are in order:
- Speed limits are clearly a recommendation. To be honest I think that they are set quite low (70 mph/110 kmh is the highest I have seen), and with broad 3-4 lanes highways pretty much everybody around me was doing on average 15-20 mph over the limit. The few police cars along the way didn’t seem bothered much.
- Americans hate blinkers. So much that cars here don’t even have the dedicated orange lights you see pretty much everywhere else in the world, and instead the red position lights blink lightly the few times the car’s owner decides to use them.
- I loved the Cleveland Museum of Art and I think it was totally worth putting up with Hertz’s awful service and many hours behind the wheel to see it. Ironically though, the other 2 stops that were intended as “side fillers” – Pittsburgh and Detroit – turned out to be the ones that really made this experience great.
All in all, I am quite happy I am done with cars for this trip.
After a few days to explore Chicago, I look forward to experiencing America from the window of a train while someone else drives.