Why it's surprisingly easy to road trip through Europe right now
I’ve spent most of this summer so far driving solo around Europe – entirely against the odds, given the state of the pandemic. It wasn’t on a jolly, I might add. Few people in their right mind would choose to squash themselves, a giant German shepherd and a great deal of luggage into a tiny Fiat 500 for a 2,500-mile road trip at the moment, just for the fun of it. If you have managed to leave the country in the past year you’ll know crossing one international border is hassle enough: try darting intermittently across five, on the Continent, with a GB number plate – a registration that screams “Rebel! Brexit! Delta variant!”
I did it for the only reason anyone would do such a mad thing – love. More specifically, to marry my German fiancé Julius, a helicopter pilot whose job this summer is to fly between Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. Bureaucracy, alas, forced us to postpone the nuptials, but fortunately, given that I am still working remotely, I was at least able to follow him around for two months (albeit it from the ground), rather than us being apart for another long-distance stint.
In truth, the trip was a mixed bag. On Instagram the whole thing looked fantastic. We scaled cliffs and dived into a mouthwash-blue lake in Switzerland, luxuriated in one of Germany’s finest hotels, gazed at apricot sunsets in Italy and crashed through salty waves with my dog, Bear, in the south of France. We also stayed mainly in small motel rooms with bad Wi-Fi, squabbled over the football and did our laundry, largely unsuccessfully, in the sink.
There was a moment on the Swiss cliff when Julius breezily announced that perhaps he didn’t want to be tied down after all (to me, that is; we were literally tethered to the rockface). I checked into the aforementioned German hotel to get some alone time. And shortly after our joyous ocean romp with Bear, seated at a nice restaurant in France, the dog vomited a good two litres of seawater over the floor. But such is life.
To my surprise, coronavirus, the thing I expected to cause us the most travel-related angst, turned out to present hardly any trouble at all.
I first set off for Germany in May, when it was still closed to Britons and before the UK’s outgoing travel ban was even lifted, via the Eurotunnel through France, which at the time had a driving curfew and a five-day quarantine on arrival policy.
Julius and I spent weeks in advance rounding up the vast amount of paperwork required: proof that I had an exceptional reason to leave the UK; evidence for the German police that we were in a committed relationship; French transit documents; Bear’s passport – not to mention the logistical gymnastics of obtaining a negative Covid result fast enough to grant me entry into France but not early enough to expire before I reached Germany.
I arrived at the Eurotunnel in Folkestone armed with a binder full of paperwork, having calculated a total of 11 things that could go seriously wrong during the 14-hour voyage between the start and finish line. And what a blissful anticlimax it was. The English border force gave a cursory check to my documents and waved me straight through, while the French official cared even less – a mere glance at my passport and no request to see my Covid credentials.
I needn’t have bothered with the preparation for the German border either: there didn’t appear to be one. I had been in Deutschland for a good half hour before I noticed the motorway signs were no longer in French.
It turned out this was not just a lucky break. Every crossing in the eight weeks that followed generated a new round of anxiety – it was nigh impossible for us to acquire the fresh “gold-standard” PCR test formally required each time we passed another border – but not once was our car stopped for checks.
Within Germany it was a different story, rules-wise. Masks in some parts of Bavaria were mandatory even outside. And this ever-compliant nation is perfectly happy to have its nostrils poked and gag reflex tickled on a regular basis. Forget needing an app to check into a pub; I was staggered to learn ahead of my first ever trip to a beer garden, in Munich’s Englischer Garten park, that I needed a negative test to enter. There was a big fence up around the tables and a burly bouncer scrutinising medical certificates and taking phone numbers – all so that we could sip a pint in the rain at a table, rather than sit cross-legged on the grass a few metres away.
Aside from all this, I found Germany to be curiously overlooked as a holiday destination. The people are polite and speak impeccable English. The streets are clean. The wine is unfathomably cheap. The weather down south was sublime. In the snatched hours between working and driving, I paddled in the glistening river that cuts through the fairytale university town of Freiburg, wandered the quaint canal corridors of Ulm, hiked in the glorious hills of Heubach, and relished my stay at the resplendent Brenners Park hotel in the Black Forest.
Switzerland was next; its defining features the same as always – breathtakingly beautiful, ludicrously expensive – but with a far more relaxed attitude to Covid protocols. On a weekend off, Julius and I ventured to Flims Laax – an alpine resort near the villages of Flims, Laax and Falera – for some rock-climbing and mountain biking, where for the first time in a long time, the pandemic felt like a thing of the past. The downside is how much it costs to do things you might assume would be free, or at least included with your accommodation package: we shelled out nearly €40 (£34) just to enter the perimeter of the glorious Lake Cauma, which lies within the resort. The upside is that, as a result, it is free of plebs and hooligans. It is one of the finest, clearest natural bodies of water I have ever dived into.
After a brief visit to Julius’s parents’ home in the Italian hills of Imperia, our trip wound up back in good old France, this time to its gloating southern shores. Considering we were perched in Antibes in the run-up to the Cannes Festival, it was exceptionally quiet. The only other Briton I encountered was a friend who had somehow talked his way in from Brazil, of all places, to spend time at his family’s home in St Tropez. Other than waiters on beaches wearing masks as chin hammocks, there were, as in the Swiss Alps, few traces of the pandemic.
Unlike in Germany, no-one was leaping across the pavement when anyone got within a 3ft-radius; unlike in England, at the other end of the spectrum, no newly-released lockdown-crazed youths appeared to be barrelling around in a drunken stupor. The sun was shining and the pace was slow. My only complaint would be about the doctor who administered the pre-departure PCR required to re-enter the UK, who so violently assaulted my nostril I'm surprised he didn't gouge a hole in my brain. Other than that, of all our pit-stops, it felt like the most reassuringly normal spot for a holiday.
I say “normal” like it’s a good thing. In truth, despite my being adamantly against lockdowns from a moral standpoint, there’s an awful lot I’ll miss about travelling in the past year. The empty roads, the quiet hotels, the once-in-a-lifetime absence of over-tourism, the ability to work remotely. I would happily have kept driving across the Continent with Bear and Julius until the end of his season in October, but alas, the London office finally called us back in.
My 20-some-hour drive north to normal, from Antibes to Essex, was misery in two halves; beleaguered by traffic, endless tolls and worsening weather, interspersed with a brief overnight stay in Beaune. I’ve since been quarantining at home, either on the phone to Julius or the incessant Border Force marshalls in what feels like equal frequency. That, and tickling my nostrils every few days to prove I am free of Covid (at-home testing kits are so much more civilised; I can personally vouch for the reliability of the Corona Test Centre).
Shortly after I returned, the UK Government somewhat bafflingly decided that fully-vaccinated arrivals from France should not be exempt from quarantine after all, due to the prevalence there of the Beta variant. Given, as we’ve seen from my driving expedition, the porousness of the French border with the rest of Europe, I imagine these new sanctions might quickly spread through other countries. Perhaps “normal” won’t be returning so soon after all.
Whether you’re planning a road trip in France or Tuscany, a drive through Britain’s most beautiful landscapes or a Route 66 adventure, we have it covered: telegraph.co.uk/tt-road-trips
