The One About Driving

1500. That’s how many miles we drove during our 10 day trip.


The number of mistakes we made during the rental car process - two.

During our trip last year, we rented a car and drove from London to Wales for a few days. Driving in England wasn’t too bad ( well, easy for me to say since I didn’t do any of the driving!!) so Chip didn’t seem to have any qualms about driving around the country. Since he was going to be doing the driving again, I let him get the rental car so he could get what he wanted. Even though last year he had made the comment that if we ever did this again he was going to get a car with an automatic transmission (rather than the manual that we had), he decided against it. That was mistake number one.

We talked about getting a navigation system, but we had bought one of those very detailed road atlases (The UK in 80 pages) and I had my binder full of maps and directions from mapquest. I didn’t figure we needed it. If you’ve been reading the posts of our trip so far, then you already know that this was mistake number two. Big mistake.

See, it’s not just that the English drive on the left side of the road - so everything in the car is on the “wrong” side and driving a stick with your left hand is probably like trying to brush your teeth or eat with a spoon left-handed. It’s more that the English way of directing traffic from place to place and controlling the flow of traffic is not like anything we’ve ever seen before.

Roundabouts: The English loooooove roundabouts (or someone in their transportation department does). In the US, roundabouts have only really started catching on in the last 5 years or so and they seem to pop up in strange places. In England, almost every intersection is controlled by a roundabout – including intersections with major highways as well as the entrance and exit ramps. Some of the roundabouts included traffic lights, but we saw very few intersections in the familiar “two intersecting lines” layout. Most of the roundabouts were two lanes wide; some were three.

Signs: With the exception of the major highways (like our interstates) where two or more of them join up and then separate, the English apparently do not believe in overhead road signage. All of the signs are along the side of the road. As we discovered, this then makes it possible in at least two situations where you can’t see the sign at all: if a big truck decides to pass you in the left lane and blocks the sign; or if the trees around the signs are overgrown and the leaves/branches cover all or part of the sign. In order to navigate through the roundabouts it was imperative that you know what lane to be in when you enter it and which “exit” the road you want is on as it is virtually impossible to switch lanes. And by the time you realize it, it’s too late.

To try and make it easier, I would count on the sign which exit we needed and then try to count to the corresponding exit and tell Chip which way to go. This mostly meant that I pointed and said “go that way”. Sometimes though the sign for roundabout had as many as 8 lines protruding from it and it was hard to tell from the sign which “number” exit we needed since the road numbers would run together and some of the lines were a lot shorter than others. Were those roads or something else? You never knew until you were going around the roundabout and by then, it was too late. Of course the one nice thing about a roundabout is that if you miss your turn you can just keep going around until you come to it again. That is of course if you realize you missed your turn before you somehow found yourself forced into taking a road that you definitely did not want to be on.

The signs also give you no sense of direction – as in north, south, east or west. Instead, they tell you which town it goes to. So, it’s not enough to know that you need to go south. You have to know what town is on the way to where you want to go because there were generally two exits for each road – one going the way you want to go and one going towards a town in the opposite direction.  Whenever we were in the car the atlas was glued to my lap.  Usually I had a couple of seconds to determine which town on the sign we were heading towards and then figure out which lane and exit we needed.  It was crazy and it was probably the 20 years of marriage that kept us from killing each other in the process.


Need gas or hungry? Don’t figure there will be a gas station or a place to get something to eat at the next exit or in the next town. Along the motorways (interstates) there are strategically placed exits with “services”. This is a large gas station and a large building with several restaurants inside (as well as bathrooms - similar to a mall food court) and they were usually about 25-40 miles apart.

View Larger MapDriving Directions

Straight vs. curvy: The English countryside is beautiful with lots of hills and more often than not, the roads follow the contour of the land. As a result, it seemed as though there were very few straight roads. And definitely no “grid” system. This means if you make a wrong turn you can’t just “go around the block”. Even in the cities this was the case. We got dreadfully lost in Nottingham as well as in Bradford/Leeds.

Street Signs. Not many to be seen, especially in towns/cities. The ones that they did have were mostly on the sides of buildings and often hard to see/read and they aren’t at every intersection. Usually we would have to drive for several blocks to even know what street we were on and then finding the right intersecting street was often a game of trial and error.   If you look at the upper right of the above picture you can see an example of a street sign (white sign to the right of the bay window).


Road Signs. Especially speed limit signs. Virtually non-existant. The first time we saw a sign indicating the “regular” speed limit was when we crossed the border into Scotland – halfway through the trip. I guess people are just expected to “know” what the speed limit is and then if the speed limit varies from the usual (like going through a town ) there is a sign to tell you what the lower speed limit is.
We had no clue what several of the signs meant:

This is a "no stopping" sign.  The first time we saw it Chip about slammed on the brakes, afraid it meant you couldn't go that way.

This is a "national speed limit" sign.  Of course, you then need to know what the national speed limits are (see above).

 

We saw lots of these:

So far, we haven’t heard anything from government officials about Chip getting speeding tickets.  We're keeping our fingers crossed...


And then, there was this sign that we saw frequently in rural areas that made us laugh:

underneath the sign it said "elderly people".  Can you even image what the AARP would do if we put signs up like this in the US??
So, what is the lesson from all of this??

1. Get an automatic

2. Get a GPS system

3. Look up road signs and speed limits before you go.

 
Cheers!