After a month or so of driving in the UK I am actually starting to get use to the seemingly-insane roadways and want to write a post about my initial impressions before I’ve been “assimilated”:
The first thing that any American getting into our car would notice is that it’s small…some would say tiny. The driver seat is easy to adjust because I just pull the lever and ram it to the extreme back stop so I can get my knees on either side of the steering wheel and make a decent stab at controlling it.
I’ve found that being small is especially striking at high speeds. When driving to work on the 'Motorway' surrounded by lots of other pod-like cars I get this strange feeling I'm on some highway of the future like in the Jetsons puttering along in my little space-pod. This is all made ever stranger since the highway cuts through some beautiful English countryside where you can see sheep grazing and 2000-year-old hedgerows separating each plot. Ancient bucolic calm is separated from a space-age Active Traffic Management superhighway by a thin fence of metal.
This other-worldly pod-commute is in stark contrast to driving in any urban environment in Britain. Navigating the 500 year-old roads of a city centre, I feel like some sort of rally-car driver fighting for my life among terminally-ill competitors with nothing to loose from a crash. If you’re going to die, they must think, might as well go pulling off some never-before-seen road manoeuvre. Everyone is peeling out, weaving in, and generally in a huge rush to move forward 1 space in the queue (ok, ok line!) at the next light. The roads of Birmingham are literally at capacity most of the time, and Americans could learn a thing or two about real road rage from the Brits.
I’m getting use to it all though, and through the worst of it you can still be warmed by the cheery accent of some BBC radio announcer talking about how it will be mostly overcast with ‘a bit of wet’ for the next 859 days in England.
2 comments:
Well I hope you guys are prepared with your "wellies" for the "bit of wet" that is in store for you!
It's really incredible how wild this driving thing must be. I mean, first you have the other side of the road bit. Then you have the always shifting bit. Then you probably have the kilometers rather than miles bit. Then you have these crazy roundabouts. Honestly, this seems harder than any higher education that I can think of.
Lauren, thanks for your great comments on our blog...we are scared out of our minds but I suppose this is somewhat natural! Yikes!
Okay, this has gone further than just a "comment," this is a full-blown email, so I'll sign off. But know that you have faithful readers out there who LOVE knowing what those crazy yanks are up to in the UK!
Ha ha. I'm loving the reaction to our road network! Having never driven in America I feel I can't compare but I will defend the compact cars we have here. At $2.20 a litre of petrol of course we are going to have small cars! I would love to drive a Hummer but it would probably cost me $200 to drive the 8 miles to work and then there would be no spaces big enough to park so I would end up having to park on top of someone's car!
Lauren and Nick's Peugoet is what we would call a 'super-mini', my mum has one and they are compact but I do feel that Nick being 6ft 4 puts him at a definite disadvantage.
And how can anyone not want to drive a manual (or stick shift for those of you across the pond). I think I would be so bored with an automatic. What on earth do you do with your free hand and foot? And how can you possibly get enough power to quickly overtake, nip in, wheel spin and handbrake turn?
Don't even get me started on roundabouts, what a great invention!
Oh and we do still use miles, the European Union haven't beaten us down on that, yet. And we drive on the correct side, left is right!
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