The plan was simple: rent a car in Naples, follow the Amalfi Coast southeast for two weeks, end up in Dubrovnik. Simple, a friend had assured me at the Barcelona airport bar where we said goodbye. "It's just a road. Keep the sea on your right and you'll find Dubrovnik."
She was half right. I found Dubrovnik. But the road turned out to be more complicated than the GPS suggested, involving three border crossings, two car breakdowns, one genuinely bad decision about a mountain pass at night, several unexpected friendships, and more wine than I'd consumed in the six months preceding this trip.
This is a story about how sometimes the best travel happens when you stop trying to execute a plan and start trying to survive it.
The Setup (Why I Was in Italy in June)
I'd quit my job. This is the kind of sentence that sounds dramatic in retrospect but felt necessary in the moment. I'd been a project manager at a consulting firm for eight years. Good job, decent salary, the kind of position where you're slowly promoted until you're managing managers instead of doing actual work, and then one day you realize you haven't thought about anything that excited you in forty-two months.
So I quit, and I gave myself two months of what I called a "decompression trip"—basically, a two-month vacation Europe with a tent and a backpack and absolutely no schedule. First stop: Spain for a friend's wedding in Barcelona. Second stop: Italy, Greece, Croatia, whatever else I could drive to before my visa ran out.
I'd never driven in Europe. I'd never done a solo road trip longer than a weekend. I'd bought a tent for the first time since college. I was, objectively, the least prepared version of myself, and somehow this felt exactly right.
The First Day (Which Sets the Tone)
I rented a car from a place in Naples that may have been slightly illegal—the owner's nephew handed me keys without checking my insurance very carefully—and pulled out of the city around noon. The Amalfi Coast is famous, and I was going to see it, and the internet promised me that following the SS163 would be straightforward.
The internet lied. The SS163—Strada Amalfitana—is the most beautiful road in the world and also possibly the most dangerous. It's a 40-kilometer stretch with something like 600 curves, where cars pass each other on turns that seem physically impossible, where buses grind gears going uphill and brakes smoking going downhill.
I made it about 8 kilometers before I had to pull over and cry a little.
A woman in a Fiat (which was somehow going faster than my rental) noticed me having a minor panic attack in a scenic overlook and asked if I was okay. She was German, about my age, and clearly amused by my distress. Her name was Sarah, and she was traveling the same route I was, and we decided, right there, to drive together.
This is how road trips go sometimes. You meet someone by accident and suddenly you're not alone.
Amalfi to Salerno to Paestum
With Sarah driving—she'd done this route before—I relaxed enough to actually enjoy the view, which is stupid to say because the view is literally vertical cliffs and blue Mediterranean and little towns that look like they were designed to be painted, not actually inhabited.
We stopped in Salerno for lunch (pasta, $8, the best pasta I've ever had), and then Sarah suggested we skip the famous Amalfi spots and instead go south to Paestum, which has ancient Greek temples, fewer tourists, and a beach where you could camp cheaply.
This is when the trip started being interesting.
Paestum is a small town with three temples that were built in 600 BC and are somehow still standing. You can touch them. There are no barriers, just ancient stone and the understanding that if you break a 2,600-year-old temple, you'll feel bad.
We camped that night in a place that cost €8 per person, where a woman rented us tent space and told us her life story without asking for much in return. She'd moved to Italy twenty years ago from Germany, opened a small camping place, raised two kids, and now her kids lived in various countries and she ran this camp alone.
"Is it lonely?" Sarah asked.
"Often," the woman, Petra, said. "But I chose this. This is important."
We sat around a campfire that night (which felt very Camping 101, but it was genuinely good), drinking wine from a nearby shop and not saying much because sometimes quiet is what's needed.
The Practical Stuff (Europe Edition)
If you're considering a Southern Europe road trip:
Rental car: Count on $35-50 per day. European rental companies are cheaper than international chains. Get extra insurance—about $15 per day. It costs more but saves you if someone hits you at 2 AM on a mountain pass in Croatia.
Fuel: Budget €1.50-2.00 per liter (roughly $6-8 per gallon). Fuel stations are everywhere but can be pricey at tourist areas. Fill up in regular towns.
The Amalfi Coast: Stunning, dramatic, potentially terrifying if you're not a confident mountain driver. Buses and delivery trucks go the same speed as cars (fast), which seems unsafe. Take it slowly. Stop frequently. Don't drive tired.
Camping: €10-20 per night, usually includes basic facilities. Book through CampingCard Europe (a physical card that gives discounts) or just show up—places are rarely full in June.
Food: Lunch menus (pranzo) are €8-15 for actual meals. Dinner is pricier. Gelato is €3-4 and is absolutely worth the money. Supermarkets (Esselunga, Carrefour) have good prepared food if you're budget-conscious.
Borders: Italy-Slovenia-Croatia requires you to leave the Schengen area (if you're a US citizen with just a tourist stamp, you can't). You need to plan this carefully. Check passport validity—you need 6 months beyond your travel dates. Have documents in the car.
Mountain passes: Real roads often require vignettes (road permits)—Slovenia and Croatia both charge for highways. Budget €20-30 for each. Some smaller roads are free but more dangerous. Choose depending on your confidence level.
Best season: June-September. May is possible but cooler. Any later than September and some places start closing.
Three Days Became Two Weeks
Sarah and I were supposed to travel together for a day, maybe two. We ended up together for the entire two weeks, which is remarkable considering we didn't know each other before a scenic overlook and a small panic attack.
We went to the islands of the Cilento coast (cheaper and less touristy than Amalfi). We found a night market in Salerno where we ate €2 pasta standing up, laughing at how good it was. We camped on a beach in Basilicata where the owner had a dog that followed us everywhere and seemed to make decisions about what we should do with our day.
From there, we should have cut east toward Croatia, but Sarah mentioned she'd never been to Pompeii, and I'd never been either, so we went north for a day—wrong direction, backtrack later—and watched ancient Roman city streets and thought about how permanent and temporary everything is simultaneously.
The Border Crossings
Three countries requires three borders. This sounds simple but is more complicated if you don't plan correctly.
Italy to Slovenia: No real border—Schengen area, you just drive over. Unless you're a US citizen with a standard tourist visa, in which case you're leaving Schengen and need to reenter, which is technically illegal. We discovered this at the Slovenia-Croatia border when a border guard asked Sarah about our documentation.
Sarah showed her German passport (fine for Schengen). I showed my US passport and the guard looked at it, then at me, then at our car (clearly packed for camping), then back at my passport.
"Where are you staying?" he asked.
"Camping," I said.
"In Croatia?"
"Yes."
He examined the passport again and basically decided that no one would camp in Croatia on purpose if they were smuggling anything, so he waved us through. This is the kind of thing that works once and would be a disaster if we'd tried it twice.
Lesson learned: If you're a US citizen doing the Italy-Slovenia-Croatia thing, get your passport stamped out of Italy officially, even if you think you're in Schengen. Re-entry without an exit stamp is technically a violation.
The Wrong Turn
The mistake that defined the second week happened outside of a town I can't remember the name of, sometime around midnight on day eleven.
We were trying to reach a camping spot near Zadar, Croatia, which was on the GPS as 90 kilometers away. The highway was €20 tolls and an hour and a half. But there was a mountain road that would shorten it to 60 kilometers and save tolls.
This mountain road looked fine on Google Maps. Google Maps, we learned, does not care about whether roads are actually drivable at night, or whether they have functional guardrails, or whether locals actively avoid them.
We made it maybe 40 kilometers on a road that got progressively worse—from proper asphalt to broken asphalt to gravel to basically "is this even a road?"—before we passed a local driver going the opposite direction who pulled over and told us (in gestures, because he didn't speak English) that the road ahead was essentially not viable for cars.
The only option was to turn around and go back forty kilometers to get to the highway, which we did in silence, and which made me consider my life choices. Sarah kept her eyes on the road and said, "We'll laugh about this later."
"Will we though?" I asked.
"Absolutely," she said.
She was right. By day two after that, we were joking about it. By the time we left Europe, it was one of our favorite stories.
Dubrovnik
We made it to Dubrovnik on day fourteen, which means we'd planned a two-week trip and taken exactly the right amount of time, which never happens.
Dubrovnik is famous for being beautiful and also for having been heavily used in Game of Thrones filming, which means it's crowded with tourists who came for the dragons more than the architecture. But late at night, when the cruise ships had left and the tour groups were back at their hotels, it was genuinely magical—old stone and turquoise water and cats that owned the ancient streets.
Sarah had to catch a flight the next morning. I had another week before I had to be back in Barcelona and then America. We'd had this conversation coming—that we'd become genuine friends, that we'd share contact information, that we'd probably lose touch gradually like most travel friendships do, which would be sad but normal.
Instead, we did something that both of us immediately regretted trying: we made a pact to visit each other at least twice a year. And somehow, impossibly, we've actually done it. It's been three years now, and we've taken trips to Berlin and Portugal and once she visited me in New York where I eventually moved.
Not all road trip friendships last. But sometimes they do.
The Practical Details Nobody Tells You
Eating alone: You'll feel weird at first. By day three, you'll sit at restaurant bars and chat with strangers and realize this is the whole advantage of traveling alone—you can actually talk to people.
Car problems: My rental broke down in a village near Trogir, Croatia. The owner of the rental company literally came to fix it himself (he was nearby). This is less likely with international chains but happened to me because I'd rented from a local. Call the rental company immediately if something breaks; they want to help more than you expect.
Best campsites: Smaller ones with owners who live on-site. They give recommendations, often cook food, become part of your trip.
Safety: I'm a solo female traveler and never felt unsafe. Southern Europe in summer is crowded, which helps. Stay in well-lit areas after dark. Tell people where you're going. Have a backup plan.
Budget for the unexpected: I budgeted €30 per day and ended up spending €40 because I kept finding expensive meals that seemed worth it. They were.
Three Years Later
I never did take a new job at the consulting firm. I've freelanced, started a small business, traveled for chunks of the year. The decompression trip became my actual life, which is the best version of how these stories can end.
Sarah visits New York once a year. I've been to Berlin to stay with her. We message weekly. We've planned a trip through Turkey for next summer.
The rental car is back in Naples, paid for and forgotten. But the road—the 1,400 kilometers of it, the beauty and the terror and the wrong turns and the unexpected friendships—that's stayed.
Sometimes the worst plans make the best trips. Sometimes driving without a real map, with someone you just met, toward a destination you're not sure you'll reach, is exactly the right way to travel.
I would do it again tomorrow. I'm actually planning to, in fact, with the addition of Greece this time, and Sarah already promised to help navigate the mountain passes.
We know the roads now. We know what to pack, how to camp, where to find good wine. We know that sometimes the journey isn't about reaching a destination—it's about the salt-stained car, the person in the passenger seat, the moment you realize you're lost but it doesn't matter because you're going in the right direction.
That's the trip I took. That's the trip that changed everything.
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