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We left Brno for Prague which is only ~210kms away. As with our drive to Brno, the Czech highways are modern and well maintained, and the speed limits are 130kmh for most of the drive. Also like our drive to Brno, the traffic speeds were much higher than the posted limits.
The difference with our drive to Prague was that the Czech drivers were super aggressive. The posted limits were 130, which the right-most lane seemed to run at… but the rest of us were running between 160 and 200 for most of two hours with one small stint to over 220kph (~140mph). Cars on this stretch were much bigger, and with more power. You had to think twice about ducking into the middle lane to let people by because if you did you might not be able to get back into the fast lane for a while as the speed difference between the two lanes was so high. Hence at least one run up to about 140mph to not give up my spot!
I haven’t really posted any more about driving temps and tire pressures here… because the Cayenne is about as unbothered as any car could possibly traveling at high 100+mph speeds for extended periods of time. The water temp stays pegged at 200F degrees, and the oil tmp actually lowers to about 191F (from about 207) when you run the high speeds. Tire pressures rise about 6F degrees per wheel, but I don’t think that’s much higher than when you’re running ~80mph.
I will say that I become hyper-sensitive to the car when running above ~110mph. I’m listening, smelling, feeling through the wheel… sensing for anything that could upset the car. The reality is this is unnecessary. This is what the Cayenne was designed for. Anything I’ve thought I sensed was just psychological. The truth is the Cayenne loves cruising well into the triple digits. Other than the adrenaline bump, there’s little difference in how the car feels driving at 140mph compared to 80mph (other than you really hear the V8). I find this remarkable given the size of the vehicle… and my wife and son are both passengers.
Rolling into Prague was very similar to Warsaw… VERY large city, but with better traffic flow than in a US city of its size (~4.5mm people), meaning that the traffic actually moves. EU cities seem to have much smarter layouts than the US… which is interesting being that these cities are about 800-1000 years older than our oldest US city. Walking and bike paths seem planned as opposed to annoying after-thoughts that impede car traffic. And not sure how to explain this yet, but the flow of traffic seems designed to get cars to their destination and out of traffic as soon as possible. I assume a big part of this is fewer cars, but I don’t think that’s all of it. Anyone who’s driven in San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, DC, Portland, Seattle, Miami, LA, etc… would immediately see the same thing I do. A crude way to put it would be that EU cities just move people (in vehicles and not) through the city faster and more efficiently. This can be complicated if your hotel is in or near “Old Town”, but for the most part, driving in EU cities is far easier than I thought. I prefer driving in Prague any day to driving in San Francisco (or any of the other US cities mentioned above).
Parking… that’s a different story. Parking here is on par with the worst of the large US cities. I highly recommend setting up parking ahead of arriving in these cities… ideally you have a hotel that has parking, but that’s not always a safe bet. In Oslo, the hotel that advertised parking had a total of 12 spots available. In that case, we got spot #12 by checking in early. In Brno, we had to park in an independent parking garage about 100 feet from the hotel because the hotel parking was already at capacity. In Prague, 95% of the garage was already full even though I parked ~90 mins before published check-in times.
Overall, I now rate Czechia (Czech Republic / Czechoslovakia) as my current favorite country to tour by car in EU. The driving, the scenery, the people, the natural attractions, the cities and the beer are all awesome. We’re already planning a return trip.
Next stop... Stuttgart!
Last edited by gonzobreath; 08-06-2024 at 02:47 PM.
The drive from Prague to Stuttgart is about 485kms, which google says will take you 5.5 hours (lots of construction). We left Prague during morning rush hour, so getting out of the city (the Marriott is on a cobble stone street adjacent to Old Town) took us about 45 mins. Even with that, we still made it to Stuttgart in ~5:15:00. Oh yeah… we also stopped about an hour for lunch 😊.
Top speed for the day was about 135mph. For most of the driving we were down around 100-120mph, but that was for hours at a time except through construction areas. I’m getting more comfortable with cruising at higher speeds for extended periods. Also interesting is my wife and son are much more relaxed at these higher speeds. At the start of the trip, they would get a little anxious at about 110mph and higher. Now, they don’t seem to perk up until around 130mph. It’s gonna suck when we return to The Netherlands where most limits are at 100kph.
As expected, the main goal of visiting Stuttgart was to visit the Porsche Museum. The museum is awesome. My one complaint was that they were honoring the 50 years of Turbos, and to do that, they had to move the GT3 collection out to move more turbos in. As a GT3 owner… I was a little bummed by this. … Until you walk through the parking garage located under the museum! Tons of amazing Porsches including multiple 992 GT3 RSs, and even a 996 GT3 RS (my personal favorite of the GT3s).
Favorite streetcar: 1998 GT1
Favorite racecar: 1971 917
Favorite 911: 1973 Carrera RS (Duh)
And here’s a little secret we accidently discovered… if you arrived at the museum in a Porsche and talk with Porsche security security team… they will permit you drive onto the outdoor museum display in front of the museum to take pictures! We were the only ones who did this for the time we were there, but the very nice security people seemed to infer anyone (who arrived in a Porsche) could do this if they obtained permission first.
Next stop… Paris, by way of Brussels, to watch the US Womens’ Soccer Team win gold!
As we are at least a day ahead of schedule we opted to return to Amsterdam before continuing to Brussels and Paris. It would be nice to eat a home cooked meal, and sleep in our own beds for a night or two.
My thought was that this would be the day when we could find the tops speed of the Cayenne. In preparation, I searched out the highest octane gas (100!), checked the tire pressures, oil, etc. By the time we left Stuttgart, the Cayenne would have flown if it had wings. We just needed to see the most beautiful road sign in existence...
Unfortunately, fate had a different plan. August in Germany is not the time for a road-trip… especially going west. There were more trucks than I’ve ever seen. But the worst foil for any high-speed running were the 4-cylinder Skodas towing 2-ton trailers. Remember the old Top-Gears where Clarkson would rail against the caravan, and deride the caravan towing drivers? I now get it. Without fail, every time we’d see the magic sign with the 4 diagonal lines denoting unlimited speed, some imbecile towing a caravan would decide that following the truck at 98kph was not good enough, and that he wanted to be going his max speed of 100kph. They would pull into the fast last causing massive excitement for us traveling at 100mph+ as we all had to jam on our brakes and pray the people behind us were paying attention. Then it would take them miles to finally make their pass. When this would happen, all the truckers ahead would see their chance to gain 2-4 kph and they would make their passes thereby completely clogging up the high-speed portions of the highway. For the most part, the truckers were great, and had excellent situational awareness of the high-speed traffic around them. The caravan drivers were complete morons. As a result, I think we max’d out at maybe 180kph (~110mph) for the day, and only in a few areas. Too much traffic that got worse the further west we went.
And then we hit the Dutch border. Oy. You literally go from unlimited with traffic moving at about 140kph down to a 100kph limit. It felt like we were crawling the last leg to our home in Amsterdam. Kinda funny that the Dutch highways were the widest of our trip with 6 lanes in each direction for long stretches, and yet they move at the speed of Lithuanian traffic.
To put the cherry on top… I had a piece of mail waiting for me when I returned. Apparently when we started our trip, I got picked up on a speed camera outside of Amsterdam. 4km (~2.4mph) over the limit. Yes… the Dutch really hate cars.
It was also ironic that on our trip of over 6000kms in 23 days, we passed 2 car accidents on the highways… One in Germany, and one in the Netherlands. Also interesting, the most clueless of caravan drivers who would cause the most dangerous situations on the Autobahn were almost all Dutch. My son would call out when we were coming up on a Dutch caravan driver just so we could all brace for potential stupidity. We now theorize that Dutch EU license plates are yellow when the rest of Europe is white so that all other drivers know to raise their caution level when approaching.
It’s gonna be a frustrating year as a Porsche driver.
So the final tally for the trip...
Total days: 23
Total driving time: 75:37:00
Total distance: 6176km (3837 miles)
Total countries: 11 (12 if you count 'seeing' Russia from ~1 mile away)
Top speed: 225kph (~140mph)
I've said this a few times, but especially after the last 3 weeks, I can honestly say there is no better car for road-tripping Europe than a Cayenne. Knowing what I know now, I would go back in time to my last road-trip around the UK and pay the extra ~$1200 to rent a Cayenne instead of renting the Audi A3 we had for 2 weeks. It's honestly a similar difference flying first-class compared to coach... except you're spending far more time in the car. Sure - I would have preferred a Turbo S Cayenne over my S, but the truth is I would have only been able to use the extra power for maybe 1-2% of the time. Put another way, there was never a time where I wished for more power, but there would have been moments where I'd have enjoyed it if it was there.
... and we still have Brussels and Paris to go.
Last edited by gonzobreath; 08-08-2024 at 07:41 AM.
Rather than drive to Paris, we opted to leave the car in Brussels and take the Eurostar high-speed train to Paris. I imagine Paris to be crazy for driving… doubly so with the Olympics.
As expected, driving in Amsterdam is still a slog. We had little to no traffic, but a soul-sucking speed-limit of 100kph with speed cameras every 1-3 kilometers in some sections. Basically, you just surrender to 100kph and count the minutes until you cross a border… ANY BORDER. I was not eager to get another ticket in my new home country during my first month of driving.
Once we crossed into Belgium, things opened up. Speed limits were raised by about 20kms across the board and speed cameras were only found every 10-20 miles… and were easy to spot. Even with the slog getting out of Netherlands, it’s still completely amazing to me that we could travel from Amsterdam to Brussels in under 2.5 hours. This is an incredible perk of living in Europe. At our home in California, 2.5 hours of driving might get me to the very cosmopolitan Fresno!
Getting to our hotel was mostly easy. Anxiety levels were raised some by navigating the parking garage for our hotel. I had to drive the Cayenne onto a car elevator that would bring us down to an underground parking garage. Pretty sure the Cayenne was the largest possible car you could get into the elevator… width and length. Each mirror had inches. All of the bumper sensors in the car were screaming at me the entire time until we drove off. Still, the Cayenne did fit, and we were able to park.
Once parked, we dumped our luggage in the room and immediately boarded our train for Paris.
We chose right.
Paris was a zoo. Many roads were closed. I’m convinced that we would have had to leave the Cayenne way outside the city and board a train into the Olympic area anyway. Paris has very good public transportation (order of magnitude over anything we have in the US), but it was max’d out. Every train was at capacity with people going to different parts of the city for one Olympic event or another. In our case, getting to the main futbol stadium (with 60k other US, Brazilian, German, French, etc. fans) was a trick even on pub-trans. The last ~1.25 miles was on foot in a giant river of humans.
And the US Women beat the Brazilians for the Gold 1-0.
Suffice it to say, leaving Paris was even crazier than it was getting to Paris. I estimate getting out of the city in a car would have taken hours. Compounding matters, they would only let you in the train station if you already had a ticket which meant the streets were flooded with people roaming around trying to figure an alternative way out. Absolute chaos.
We awoke the next day in our hotel in Brussels eager to get home and really call our trip done. CarPlay said it would take 5 mins longer to get home than to get there, but still around 2.5 hours.
Car Play was wrong!
Belgium is a super tricky city to drive in. By far, it was the most difficult of the 12 countries we driven through in the last month. The trouble was that there was a giant open-air market between us and the main highway. Many streets were blocked off meaning we would have to meander around the city. Brussels is beautiful, but a giant pain in the ***. The problem is that they have these giant roundabouts with about 8+ roads coming into them. CarPlay (google maps) would tell you the roundabout was coming, and what number exit to take, but it would not tell you how to enter the roundabout. In one of the roundabouts there were 3 different chutes for entering the roundabout. If you guessed wrong and got in the wrong chute, you could not exit on your desired road. Each lane in the roundabout had a cement barrier between you and the other lanes. Suffice it to say, we guessed wrong more than half of the time which more or less broke CarPlay. Lots of 'Recalculating route..." As a result it took us easily another 20 minutes to get out of the city than it should have. Many wrong turns followed by excursions through back alleys and one-way side streets. I came away with the same feeling I had in Italy… very beautiful, but chaotic. 95% form and 5% function.
If that were not enough, we then got another dose of Dutch traffic management stupidity. About 30km from our exit from the highway, traffic came to a grinding halt. I don’t mean it inched along at 5mph… I mean it halted… for over 40 minutes. In over 7000kms of driving through 12 countries in the last month, we’ve seen 3 highway accidents. Two have been Dutch where you have the lowest speed-limits in all of Europe. Worse, neither the drivers nor the police seem to know what to do to clear an accident. No one appeared hurt, and all cars but one appeared drivable when we finally made it to the scene.
My advice to anyone planning a road-trip in Europe would be to avoid Netherlands. Great country to visit if you’re not driving. Very frustrating on multiple levels if you are driving.
Now that we’re back in our home in Amsterdam, I can honestly say that among Northern EU countries, Germany and East should be on everyone’s wish-list. Scandinavia is pretty cool… but Estonia through Germany are a driver’s paradise for beauty, adventure and all out fun.
We are currently planning our next 2 EU road-trips. The first will be Belgium, France, <Chunnel>, England, Wales, Ireland. The second will be Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Slovenia. I’ve heard Spain has amazing driving roads, but I don’t know that we’ll have time to see them ourselves before our year is up.
08-06-2024, 02:44 PM
