Driving Miss Crazy

Two car accidents and one motorcycle accident, all of which were bone-breakers, have given me a pretty bad case of PTSD, especially exacerbated when driving. Combine that with narrow roads, seemingly speed-limitless highways, and signs in Italian, and I am one traffic circle away from a nervous breakdown. Now that we have a rental car in Italy, DH and I have to play rock-paper-scissors each time we get behind the wheel because neither of us wants to be the one who has to drive.

When it's my turn, my hands hurt so bad from white-knuckling the wheel that it takes days to recover from a five-minute trip. If DH drives, we have to replace the floorboards for all of the times I slam my foot to the imaginary break pedal on my side.

Our first rental car was so small, it could have fit into the trunk of my Ford Escape that we left behind in the states. Normally, I would have refused driving in such a small car; I would rather drive in a Sherman Tank any day. But the one thing that saved me was that it was comparable in size to most of the other cars on the road. Plus, if I had to carry a child on my shoulders one more time for a three mile trek, I was going to need back surgery, and I didn't want to waste that much time in the hospital.

Having been GPS-dependent since our last move from Texas to Georgia, it was a bit of a switch having to rely on a paper map. I forgot how big they were, and how you actually had to figure out the best way to go; that it wasn't going to automatically be highlighted for you. My Girl Scouts skills came in handy, and we were able to find our way from the car rental place to our hotel, five blocks away.

Ciao' for now!