The Days of the Grand Tour .
One of the unforgettable experiences of beginning your tour in France, one which can never fail to impress you, is the perfectly inexplicable fact that while you may land at Boulogne in a crowd of 3o or 4o cars, within io miles of the town they will have all gone out of sight and hearing. I do not know where they go to, but they disperse and spread out and disappear in a manner which you have to motor at home regularly in order to appreciate. Immediately after starting up your engine, Customs formalities fulfilled and the freedom of the road handed to you in the form of your papers, you get that feeling which is worth all the others in the world, of being a real explorer. You are alone with your thoughts and ambitions. Flashing kilometre stones and direction posts bear the most exciting names, the most impressive distances, and you are able in the utmost comfort to imagine yourself back in the days when people made the Grand Tour in travelling chaises and thought nothing of the drive from Edinburgh to Rome. In spirit you are living in the most picturesque decade of the eighteenth century.
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