Many visitors from N America come to the UK and assume that because it’s a small country, it takes no time at all to get between cities. On a cruise forum last week, an American who had three days before their cruise sailed from Southampton, proposed an itinerary with a hired car, visiting a number of widely scattered places that would have meant them spending almost all of that time driving on boring motorways. I have seen proposals to visit London on a six-hour layover in Southampton (hint - A train to London takes the best part of two hours and you may have a half-hour wait at either end).
As for driving to Italy from France for an afternoon; I guess it might depend on where in France you were. Paris to Rome is a 14-hour drive on a good day; Nice to Genoa is less than 2 hours.
From here in Phoenix metro to San Jose, a trip I make about once a year, is fourteen hours on a good day.* In a similar vein, the western US is rife with stories about Europeans landing in Los Angeles and intending to rent a car to see LA, Grand Canyon, and San Francisco in a span of four days, then depart from Seattle the day after that.
Once while traveling on CA-88 from Carson City to San Jose I chanced on some people in a pull-out puzzling over maps laid out on the back deck of their car. Being a good Samaritan I stopped and it turned out they were German tourists on their way to San Francisco. How they got there I have no idea as it was off the beaten path to the Bay Area but using my rusty high school German I was able to convey to them it was at least five hours to SF on a winding two-lane highway for a driver who knew the way. It being 9pm already and they weren’t catching a flight or anything, it would have been a lot better to take 89 to South Lake Tahoe, lay up for the night, and push off in the morning on US-50, a much easier drive.
*Only because I’ve learned a way to bypass the LA basin to get to I-5.
One of the libraries found the older brother for me, and I had a talk with him and his wife. They’re still in touch with the older sister, but the younger sister dropped communications with them about a year after Bob’s mom died. They’re going to talk to the older sister and have my number in case she wants to talk to me.
I was right on one thing - the older pair of siblings had a different mother, and there’s about an 18 year difference in age between Bob and his older brother.
I also found a piece of paper in Bob’s stuff with the younger sister’s address. I think it was an apartment so I might be able to find her through that.