Travel in Europe: Why driving is better than flying

I write this now because we left our home in the Welsh borders yesterday morning at the same time as our hosts left their son at Leeds University. While we were driving out, they had to get a train to Manchester Airport and fly to Geneva where they’d either get the bus or be met by another son who’d drive them the 15 mins home, arriving many hours before us.

The journey I was about to undertake is a very familiar one, indeed when Geneva had a motor show I’d do it every year. It was my little ritual: drive out one day, attend the show the next, and drive home the day after. This year would be a little different because Geneva is merely the first stop on a small trip around the Balkans planned by Mrs F and I for years. So, for starters, I was not alone.

Our transport is a BMW M340i Touring, a small estate packing a big punch courtesy of its 3-litre turbocharged straight-six motor. The painful bit was the 4:30am alarm but with everything prepped in advance we merely threw on some clothes, dragged a brush across the molars and fell into the car. The 200 miles to the Channel Tunnel took, as it always seems to do at that time in the morning, three hours to the minute. Forty minutes later we were on a train, having breakfasted in the meantime, 40 minutes after that we were on an autoroute.

The BMW was perfect: I set the cruise control to 140km/h, changed the speedo from imperial to metric and wafted along a largely deserted motorway, catching up on life with my considerably better half, delighted to be out of England and already feeling myself start to decompress.

Reims came and went followed by the only minor drama of the trip when I pulled into a fuel station with 50 miles range remaining and discovered it had no fuel, which I thought somewhat defeated the purpose. I was pretty confident we’d make the next one, but only by going slowly and putting up with that slightly nervy feeling when the range hits zero and you’ve still got 10 kilometres to go. Almost all modern cars give you a little wriggle room even when the readout says you have none, but rather than stressing myself and Mrs F, we came off at the next junction, filled at the nearest town and rejoined the motorway. We’d lost, at most, 15 minutes.

Then came decision time: do you stay on the Autoroute de Soleil and not turn left until Macon, which is easy but adds 100km to your journey, because it is the opposite and adjacent sides of a triangle, or do you do the hypotenuse and go direct on the single carriageway way road, straight over the Jura? If I’m on my own I’m usually in something interesting and mountain road is phenomenal, so I do that. But today I had a passenger whose stomach for such things has limited patience. So I consulted and was told, a little to my surprise, to proceed directly over the top.

You need something with a bit of punch to squirt past the lorries and a lot of composure to stop my wife feeling ill in the hairpins. The BMW has both. Over we went, the border was unmanned, so we stopped at the next petrol station, bought a motorway vignette and were sitting in our friend's house in Switzerland some 660 miles from our own in Wales shortly thereafter. The whole journey had taken fewer than 12 hours and could have been done far faster but for our fuel delay and if I’d driven in France at the constant 100mph that was once my natural gait here. Today I just don’t fancy the fines.

Our friends had a rather different kind of day. They got to Manchester in plenty of time to catch their flight, which then became delayed, and eventually cancelled. They managed to get seats on another aircraft out of Birmingham, caught another train and got to the airport only to discover that the flight was delayed too, and then delayed some more. Their eta was being pushed back and back to the point where instead of being in Geneva by 2pm, they were now scheduled to arrive four minutes before midnight. And because I travel a bit, I knew what would happen next. Geneva airport has a midnight curfew and the moment the arrival time strayed the other side of it, that was that. They cancelled that flight too. 

As we were going to bed having spent the early evening drinking cold beer on the lake before walking back for a fine supper prepared by the resident son, they were in solid traffic in a coach on the M1, heading for an extortionately priced Ibis hotel in Luton so they might catch another flight in the morning and finally get home. As I write this I’ve just been on the EasyJet tracker and discovered that that flight is now also delayed. By the time they get here, we’ll be gone and our first chance to meet up since before Covid gone with it.

Our journey was so easy that despite a steady stream of offers from Mrs F to do a stint, I drove the whole way myself, arriving no less fresh than I’d be on any day starting that early. By contrast, the last four flights I’ve tried to catch were, respectively, delayed by 27 hours, cancelled, delayed by three hours and delayed 90 minutes. As a similarly world-weary colleague of mine put it: ‘air travel these days is utterly hateful. And that’s on the rare occasions it doesn’t go wrong’. When it does, it swiftly becomes a nightmare. By contrast, our trip here by fast, comfortable, connected, frugal BMW estate was a joy.