A Date with Bibendum

I was at my neighborhood bookstore yesterday evening, checking out the travel section, when I saw the sagging shelf of old boxes and torn labels from the corner of my eye. My heart started racing.

Maps!

I eagerly pulled the first of three boxes labeled “Europe” from the shelf and joyfully riffled through the thick packs, searching for countries I want to explore on my road trip. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was a cartographer in a previous life. I can pour over maps for hours, garnering information about topography and natural features from the orientation of street grids and the curving lines of roads. As an urban planner, I look at a city map and know where modern settlers landed and built homes and commerce, and why streets skew in the oddest places. I can make pretty good guesses about population densities from looking at roadways and block patterns. Maps provide an abundance of information to be deciphered, and I have always been excited about the many possibilities and choices they offer.

And there in the bookstore, I re-affirmed my decision, made last month, that my European road trip will be a long, leisurely date with Bibendum.

Who or what is that, you ask?

Bibendum is his Latin name. In English, we know him as the “Michelin Man” – that roly-poly, faintly mummy-like mascot for the Michelin brand of tires, maps, and restaurant guides. He’s printed in the top corner of every Michelin map, smiling and encouraging you to get in your car and drive. And Bibendum and I have a deal for my next road trip: he will bring the maps, and I will provide the ride.

He wasn’t along for the ride on my US road trip. For that adventure, I had a very large, laminated map on my home wall for big-picture planning before the trip, and a spiral-bound road atlas in the car for the drive. That Atlas was for confirming general routes but I mostly relied on GPS each day. Without a navigator in the passenger seat, Google Maps made it easy to plug in a route and then focus on the road. No checking the folds of paper for missed turns or squinting to find the state highway number squished in the corner of the map. It made finding my way an easy endeavor but there was a big downside. I realized early in the trip that it was hard to remember where I had been. Oh, I can tell you I stopped at a museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin and stayed overnight in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I can’t give you specifics about the highway numbers of the actual back roads I took and the minor landmarks I passed. And it was a constant effort to stay away from the main roads and meander along the less-traveled byways. GPS gave me alternatives but really wanted to get me there the fastest way possible. I covered a lot of miles and GPS made it all so easy.

Too easy.

It was a bit like what happens when you drive the same route to work or to drop your kids at school every day for weeks and years on end and you can do it without thinking. Then one day, when you have to go to the dentist or want to play hooky and go to the beach, you unconsciously take your usual route instead of making a left instead of a right. And you realize just how much you are on automatic pilot each day.

GPS is automatic pilot for me, which is great in most of my daily driving near home when I am focused on getting from point A to B and avoiding traffic, but not so great on road trips. There is no automatic pilot with paper maps: I really must pay attention. Like everything else about the Blue Car, paper maps put me in the moment, forcing me to see every street sign as I search for where I need to turn next.

In 1970, if I had been there when the Blue Car was fresh off the Porsche factory floor, I would have joyfully driven it away and planned a road trip that relied on maps of the paper kind. I like the idea of traveling through Europe this way, of exploring potential routes and the promise and mystery they offer with a map on the seat next to me. Of making guesses of what I will find in these new places based on the switchbacks and the little symbols on paper. Guesses that will likely result in missing some turns, getting hopelessly turned around at least once, and experiencing something unexpected.

Last night in the bookstore, I pulled out the Michelin map for Southern France and opened it flat, spreading it out against the wall of shelves and reading the clues and directions embedded in those symbols on paper. Two teens came past and peered over my shoulder, either because they were humoring me and chuckling at this historic artifact or perhaps, they were genuinely interested in the possibilities of what lay before us.

It was lovely to see the mountains of the Alps, and the recommended scenic drives lined with green. I looked at the large text reading “Bordeaux” to the west and began to imagine the vineyards and rows of grapes, each plot of land representing a different terroir of soil, sun, and microclimate. I was thousands of miles away from that bookstore, imagining how it would feel to drive those lines on the map in the Blue Car. My imagination last night may not fit reality and that’s ok. I want to be surprised; I want to come around a curve and gasp in delight at what unfurls before me, like I did when I was a child and went to Storyland for the first time and saw the Mother Goose statue towering over me 20 feet high, in all her magical wonder. Like I did as a college student with my first step off the airport bus on to Radhuspladsen in Copenhagen and saw buildings older than any I had seen or inhabited before. Those are good feelings to have, and we have fewer and fewer as we get older. It seems like we have “seen it all” – either in person or on the internet, in a book, on the news. Mother Goose is no longer quite so magical now that I am taller and she’s not the giant she once was.

But I haven’t seen it all. Not by far. And I don’t want to research every “hidden treasure of France” ( the algorithms are doing their work and I am getting a lot of “unexplored small town gems of Europe” posts in my social media feeds) and plug them all into my phone and set out on autopilot. I don’t want to know what to expect before I get there, and then be disappointed because the image on Instagram was photo-shopped to death or the photo was taken on the one clear-sky sunset during the month of April. Of course I will do some research and I can’t avoid some of the previews, but I think my best chance for surprise and wonder, for being the kind of Blue Car explorer I wish to be on this trip, is to pull out the paper maps and meet places as they come, in open wonder and minimal expectations and be surprised, for good or bad or somewhere in between. Because sometimes the best things are hidden and it takes getting lost or taking some unintended turns to reveal what is really there. I love paper maps for this reason, and I think Bibendum and I can have a good go at it.

This is what things must have been like for early automobile owners at the turn of the Twentieth Century – well before the Blue Car made it out of the factory. The automobile was new and people were driving – but they were staying close to home. The wider world out there was unmapped, a bit like Columbus exploring beyond where people thought the world was flat. If you took your car beyond your community, where would you get gas? Would you find food to eat? A place to stay? What would happen if you got a flat? For the two Michelin brothers who founded their tire company in 1889, short trips meant tires that lasted a long time. Not good for sales. So, in 1900 André and Édouard created the "Guide Michelin" for France to promote car travel and tire sales. The guides and maps grew quickly, with the first international guide (for Belgium) released in 1904 and a separate, larger map series starting in 1905, showing the Auvergne region around the company headquarters. By 1909, André completed the company’s first 48-sheet map of all of France at 1:200,000 scale, incorporating features like road conditions and distances.

Looking back, it would have been a courageous thing to explore unknown territory in 1900 in your new car. Much more courageous than my plan to take a stack of maps and use GPS back up if I need it next year.

And that brings me back to Bibendum. The Michelin Man was literally born from a flash of creative inspiration when the Michelin brothers saw a pile of tires stacked in the shop. That tire pile looked like a torso, and they had the idea to add arms and make it a mascot. He has changed over time (haven’t we all). His first renderings seem scary to me, like a drunk, cigar smoking mummy on the loose. But the public loved him; he got his name from the Latin phrase “Nunc est Bibendum” (Now is the time to drink). No, they weren’t encouraging alcohol and driving (although I suspect much of that happened). Bibendum was shown in advertisements holding a cocktail glass filled with broken glass and nails and hardware – letting the public know Michelin tires would "drink up" any obstacles on the road. He seems like a good companion to have on my trip, don’t you think?

My commitment to using paper maps got a cosmic boost just a month ago when I was in London. On my last full day in the city, I took a morning walk from my hotel toward Sloane Square because I hadn’t been to that part of London before and I also wanted to go to Ottolenghi Café for breakfast. I had made the decision to use real paper maps for my trip just the week before and I was still mulling over the practicalities of it all when I came around a corner and there, before me, was Michelin’s first permanent headquarters in the UK – a magnificently decorated Art Nouveau and Art Deco-inspired building featuring Bibendum throughout. Built in 1911 and made of glazed tiles and stained glass, the structure has two glass cupolas, resembling piles of tires, on either side of the building. Michelin has been gone from the building for a few decades, and it is now a mixed-use complex with a store, restaurant, and bar on the ground floor and I went in to look around. The original garage bays were open to the sidewalk, and I was drawn to the fresh flowers for sale in the middle of the café space. I came close to a bunch of peonies and breathed in deeply and smiled. Surely finding this building was a sign! I was (and am) more convinced than ever of the benefits of putting the GPS away for most of my trip and letting the paper maps guide me.

Last night, after I made my bookstore purchases and came home, I opened the map of Southern France (northern France is on back order) and spent some time reading the town names, looking at the dead-end roads leading into the Alps, and searching for the green-lined scenic recommendations and thin white roads that represent potentially wonderful local routes. I took a deep breath and let myself feel trepidation and yes, perhaps a little fear, about this trip for the first time. The map, a red national one (Michelin color-codes its maps (red=national, orange/yellow=regional, blue=city)), shows a twisting mass of lines and symbols and numbers. It offers its own language of symbols and keys – some known to me and others to be learned and memorized. The map represents only half of one country of the many I want to explore. I can speak rudimentary Italian and Spanish but I don’t know French (or German or Dutch or Portuguese). I don’t know where those myriad roads on the map will take me but I do know English won’t be an option on many of the back roads and scenic routes I plan to explore. I imagine every day will have its stresses and questions and confusion. But I also know that fear is a barrier to joy.

And besides, Bibendum will be with me. He doesn’t know how tiny the Blue Car is yet, but we will manage somehow. Michelin has slimmed him down over the years, from an overstuffed hulking figure to a more athletic and svelte companion. He’s got the maps, and he will see me through.