Road Treep!

I try to find the Europcar parking lot at the Montparnasse train station, but can find only the Avis spaces, and leave it there. The guy at the Europcar desk looks at me like I'm an imbecile, takes the keys and just sort of waves me away, without even any paperwork.

So can you do a road trip in France? Yes. The motoring is excellent.

The roads are in many cases delightful. We will always remember the castles of the Loire.

Road-tripping might not be a great idea if you're a nervous driver. There are signs you can't understand, roundabouts instead of traffic lights, narrow streets, not enough parking and so on. You don't want to have to deal with these uncertainties while being already unnerved by driving a stick shift.

In some ways driving in France is easy. The superhighways don't seem to be terrorized by 18-wheelers. The signage is great. In America you get off the highway and try to figure out what road to take, but in France you just follow the signs to the next village. The villages rarely have a traffic light; you just wind your way through a medieval maze and then quickly pop out into farmland again.

But road-tripping isn't cheap. The easy-come, easy-go roadside motel largely remains a foreign concept. Maybe someday France will have the road-trip infrastructure that exists in America, but that's probably not something we should hope for, because when we go to Europe we want to know, at all times, that we are in Europe.

And reluctantly I concede that there are virtues to planning. There comes a moment when you realize that improvisational motoring is really not so different from being lost. Freedom's just another word for not knowing which way to go. Next time I might even take the ultimate precaution and, prior to hitting the road, buy a guidebook to France.

Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine and writes Achenblog.