I’m sat in the passenger seat of our minibus. We’re driving through Europe with over 450 miles ahead of us TODAY.
For some reason, the sat nav has routed us off the motorway and onto a regional road that weaves its way through local villages — perfect. Exactly what we need at the start of the long drive.
To make matters worse, when we got off the motorway we ended up behind a lorry. One of those massive ones with the trailer as long as a train.
You know the ones: they take up exactly the full width of the lane, and no inch less; they need loads of space to make the smallest turn; if there is a hill, they will use all their power to climb at max 20 miles an hour, they take three days to accelerate to any sensible speed and the minute they do, they have to slow down for something again — like I said, PERFECT.
There is a third problem too. We’re driving on the right-hand side of the road (so like most of the world) in a British car… Meaning that as a passenger I sit in the middle of the road and only I can tell when and if we can overtake — no pressure, then.
As luck would have it, though, the sat nav shows no chance of even the smallest stretch of straight road. Bend after bend all the way for about 100 miles.
So, after a series of profanities, eye rolls and over-exaggerated sighs from both of us, we have, reluctantly, accepted our fate of slow, behind-a-lorry driving for a good while…
What we didn’t take into account is what we realised within the first 10 minutes on this regional road…
What happened next was in an email…
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