The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

The Normandy Road to Cherbourg Is as Wonderful as Any in France —See p. 226
DWELLERS IN ARCADY, THE SHIP DWELLERS, ETC.
Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
Fellow-wanderer:
The curtain that so long darkened many of the world's happy places is lifted at last. Quaint villages, old cities, rolling hills, and velvet valleys once more beckon to the traveler.
The chapters that follow tell the story of a small family who went gypsying through that golden age before the war when the tree-lined highways of France, the cherry-blossom roads of the Black Forest, and the high trails of Switzerland offered welcome to the motor nomad.
The impressions set down, while the colors were fresh and warm with life, are offered now to those who will give a thought to that time and perhaps go happily wandering through the new age whose dawn is here.
A. B. P. June, 1921.

Originally I began this story with a number of instructive chapters on shipping an automobile, and I followed with certain others full of pertinent comment on ocean travel in a day when all the seas were as a great pleasure pond. They were very good chapters, and I hated to part with them, but my publisher had quite positive views on the matter. He said those chapters were about as valuable now as June leaves are in November, so I swept them aside in the same sad way that one disposes of the autumn drift and said I would start with Marseilles, where, after fourteen days of quiet sailing, we landed with our car one late August afternoon.
Most travelers pass through Marseilles hastily—too hastily, it may be, for their profit. It has taken some thousands of years to build the Pearl of the Mediterranean, and to walk up and down the rue Cannebière and drink coffee and fancy-colored liquids at little tables on the sidewalk, interesting and delightful as that may be, is not to become acquainted with the pearl —not in any large sense.