The following article is from our February 2008 issue.

Race, Roll, Ride or Glide An empirically imprecise essay about driving in Europe and America - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Why would a pair of septuagenarians drive thousands of miles every year on both sides of the Atlantic? Both motoring environments offer their own peculiar pleasures and maddening annoyances, not to mention mortal perils. One has better drivers, the other, bigger hotel beds. On the road on either side, our intrepid couple found, the Marquis de Sade's legacy lives on.

You read it here first: If diabetes has not claimed my toes before I turn 80, St. Louis drivers will. My wife, Gillian, who is beyond suspicion of misogyny, is even more precise in her prediction. She says that an aggressive young woman with a mobile phone glued to her left ear and a cigarette between her lips will ultimately dismember us by driving over our feet or ravaging our automobile.

Every time we cross Clayton Avenue on our way to the shops either on foot or by car, we receive a foretaste of this fate. Just this morning on our way home from the grocery store, we thought the end had come. Vrooom! A red Cadillac came screeching toward us the wrong way up St. Rita Avenue. And who's at the wheel? Sure enough - yet another one of those mysteriously willful St. Louis ladies with a cell phone and nicotine addiction, and a very angry face.

So this is one reason why Gillian refuses to take the wheel of our white Dodge Stratus; the other is the unnerving American custom of passing each other on both sides as they glide along the Interstates forcing you to check all three rear mirrors constantly. In Europe, overtaking on the right is a sure way to lose your license.

That said, I relish being part of the gentle flow of cars and the world's most magnificent trucks all moving along at 65 or 70 mph. There is something soothing about activating my cruise control and then listening to a succession of National Public Radio affiliates belonging to different colleges whose areas we cross, while Gillian periodically pinches my right thigh in order to keep me from dozing off.

Presumably this preference makes me already part of that new species of genetically altered Europeans that U.S. residents seem to have mutated into, according to an English acquaintance of mine. This thought occurred to me recently in Germany, when my friend Hans invited me to test drive his brand new Audi A6 diesel quattro, a marvelous machine worth $60,000. Can you believe it? It had no cruise control! "How is this possible − at this price?" Hans shrugged: "We don't need it here. The way we drive on the autobahn without speed limits, there is nowhere you can just roll along steadily like in America."

Here is the first fundamental difference between our two countries: In Germany, motorists don't terrorize you with the goofiness of cell phone infatuation but with raw impatience, a national trait its denizens explain away as a form of patriotism, a self-sacrificial contribution to the need of sustaining vehicular superiority. Driving at break-neck speeds, they reason, is their way of complementing the craftsmanship of German engineers.

While I do wish U.S. legislators would take their cue from European parliaments and ban the use of mobile phones while operating a car nationwide, I still prefer the tranquility of American road travel, which just goes to show that I am detribalized.

In Europe, I happen to own a dark-green older version of the Audi A6. It is registered in France and does have cruise control, which I use all the time on French "autoroutes," albeit at a swifter clip than in the U.S.: 80 mph is the speed limit in France, and that is just right for me.

Driving in France is nice because French motorists, being endowed by their Creator with Cartesian logic, are predictable. Like the Germans, they stick to the right and pass on the left. Like Americans, they roll with the flow, except that they are always inexplicably bunched together like racing car drivers on the Indianapolis Speedway. Every Frenchman is a wannabe Michael Schumacher but don't tell them I said it.

Tailgating being one of France's national sports, I am tempted to attach a bumper sticker to the rear of my Audi, bearing the words, "Ne touchez pas mon derrière," meaning: Stay off my hiney! But this might be misunderstood. Therefore, I content myself with warning tailgaters by just tipping gently on my brake pedal while maintaining full speed. That usually works; tailgaters with gray matter see the warning light and drop back, at least for a while.

There is something else I love about driving in Western Europe: Road and street signs are logically placed and readable. This is not the case in the United States, particularly not the East Coast. I have a theory about that. The people responsible for putting up traffic signs in New York and New Jersey must be blood relatives of those French brutes who devised the monstrous pedestrian passages connecting Paris railway stations with subway stops from where you catch the Metro to another station across town.

I am convinced these people are all descendants of the Marquis de Sade. I suspect French carriers of his DNA are watching gleefully through one-way mirrors as sick, pregnant and elderly passengers collapse in droves while carting their luggage up and down endless sets of stairs: "Whoops, there goes another one. Gee, this is fun!"

It occurred to me that de Sade's American progeny get their jollies by observing accidents through hidden cameras when drivers are forced to twist their necks in order to read a sign pointing to the New Jersey Turnpike, which is hidden deftly behind a larger white and black marker giving some local traffic information.

Maybe they delight in watching you as you try to read tiny street names on dirty white and green plates while following your Mapquest printout, if indeed these plates had not disappeared years ago. Or they are having a hilarious time at the outskirts of Indianapolis as you shoot off toward Ohio when you actually have Michigan on your mind. It could only have been sadism that made Indiana highway officials withhold a sign directing me toward Interstate 69 via Interstate 485 when I recently traveled from St. Louis to East Lansing.

By far the most sadistic trick de Sade's American offspring play on you is closing rest areas of which there are few and far between in the first place. Suppose you have diabetes, which results in certain urges. In Europe, this would pose no problem. You take the next exit and head for the nearest tree.

Try this in America though! It happened to me just as I was listening to an NPR program on sophisticated new electronic pillories for sex offenders. Expose yourself to a tree and you wind up on a national list of perverts, along with convicted pedophiles. This was a risk I recently took when some Sam or Sadie Sade roped off a rest stop on Interstate 69 and put up a sign inviting me to proceed for another 100 miles.

On the other hand, once it gets dark, U.S. Interstates are the roads to be on. You will always find Holiday Inn Express, a Hampton Inn and Suites or a Marriott offering a huge room with an enormously comfortable bed, a fitness center, indoor pool, free breakfast and free Internet access for about $100 a night.

What a blessing this is compared with Europe, where the advent of Internet communication as a normal feature in everyday life has provided hoteliers with a windfall opportunity for legalized highway robbery! Moreover, comparing inexpensive accommodation along the freeways on both sides of the Atlantic gives a whole new meaning to the concept of generosity versus pettiness.

Last year in France, a dramatic incident forced me to crash out in a chain hotel for $100 a night. My bed was so narrow I fell out of it every time I tried to turn over. The toilet seat wobbled alarmingly. The access to my room was a deathtrap − badly lit, with ice on the steps. However, the flip side of this adventure was an amazing experience quite unlikely to happen to you in the United States or many other parts of the world.

I came off the autoroute near Tours in a hurry because Gillian had suddenly developed a temporary neurological problem. I stopped at a toll station and asked the young woman working there for directions to the University Hospital. "What is the matter with your wife," she inquired. I told her. "Then don't go all the way downtown," she advised me. "Drive to the next traffic light, turn left, continue one block and turn left again, and your wife will be in safe hands."

And she was. Gillian wound up in a superb emergency center equipped to diagnose her condition. Such intelligent advice from a humble tollbooth attendant more than offset the discomfort of my hotel room because it convinced me that some things were still very right in the Old World.

Then there is the matter of food. In France, Italy and Germany, you usually find at least a passable, sometimes even excellent restaurant along the super highways. In America, you don't, not if you have a spoiled palate. That is why we always keep a well-stocked picnic basket on the back seat of our Dodge.

So think of us as we are now safely installed in a generous chain hotel and have swum 100 laps in its pool - what, do you suppose, does the weary traveler need next? Correct: He wants to go down to the bar, knock back a stiff, dry Martini, proceed to the restaurant and order a juicy steak with a crunchy salad, a baked potato and a bottle of those luscious Californian or Washington state red wines.

But here comes the rub. There is neither a bar nor a restaurant in chain hotels of that type anymore. This obliges you to do the last thing you want to do after a tiring journey: get back into your car and drive for sometimes several miles to the nearest steakhouse.

Occasionally, you end up in a wonderful place, sometimes in a truly funny joint endearingly devoid of any sophistication. In Pontiac, Illinois, we were served our Tanqueray Martini in a water glass so huge that I will refuse to confess here in writing to having driven back to the hotel after the meal.

But a night in a Mexican restaurant by the name of "Pedro's" just across the highway from the Holiday Inn Express in Cloverdale, Indiana, topped everything. "Do you have red wine," I asked the waiter. "What do you mean by that?" he wanted to know. "Vino tinto," I said. "Si," he replied and came back with a sickly-sweet beverage that tasted like mouthwash and turned out to be a wine cooler.

We settled for several Tequilas, chortling about the eccentricities of this curious new world that is our home now - a world where a Spanish-speaking waiter, of all people, did not know the difference between red wine and a soda pop that yet another descendant of the Marquis de Sade - of this I am sure − cooked up as a fiendish assault on the toes of diabetics like me.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and a Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.