Written by: Beck

I've been on two vacations that have taken me through Italy. In both cases, I was behind the wheel of a rental car driving like a semi-deranged loon much of the time (often as a result of sleep deprivation rather than any lack of appreciation for safety--not that I don't also suffer from said lack). While I've driven on the German autobahns, I was never able to enjoy the sort of sustained high-speed driving there that I could on Italian freeways. There's nominally a speed limit on those roads (130kph, roughly 80mph), but realistically you can drive however fast you like (for instance, 200kph) and no one is going to interfere. I didn't see a single car pulled over by the polizia my entire time there. In fact, my only interaction with the Italian police was to ask one officer for directions. He was busy stuffing his face with noodles, told me he didn't know, and pointed me at a nearby place of business telling me to ask for directions there. In other words, I found Italian police to be fairly useless. No, there isn't really a point to this story--I'm just story telling for its own sake.

The thing is, in the future I think I might just have to tone things down a bit should I ever find myself tooling around Italy again. Why? Excellent question. Here's my answer:



Yes, that's right, Lamborghini decided to donate one of their cars to the highway patrol. Incidentally, should you ever decide to go to Rome, my advice would be to forget about renting a car. Just bring a bunch of Euros to pay taxis with. Trust me on this one. Oh yeah, and Ford Escort station wagons, high speed, rain, and Czech freeways don't really mix. You're going to have to trust me on that one too.

In other news: I'm going to be away from the computer all weekend, so unless my fellow bloggers feel compelled to pick up the slack, there won't be too much changing at INCITE over the weekend. If you get bored, I'm sure you can find something else to entertain yourselves.