Travel

My husband did all the driving for that trip and he didn't like it one bit. Very hard to get used to. Not only that, but you are sitting on the other side of the front seat in your car--wheel's on the right. He kept wanting to veer over to the left side of the road, and I was sitting in the shotgun seat always saying, "get back! get back!" because I felt like he was going to run us into something along the left side of the road. This happens because when you are driving on the right side of the road, you follow the center line to position your car. He was following the left side of the road, unconsciously, in the same way.

And there are NO shoulders on those roads and often you have a brick or stone wall running right up to the edge of the road. Or a hedge or something. Very nerve-wracking. The multi-lane roads were okay, but many, many of the roads in the U.K. are these small, narrow roads with barely enough space for one lane each way, with no wiggle room, or they go down to just the one lane. A car would come up behind us and he'd feel like he had to speed up until he could pull over and let them pass. The posted speed limits were about 65 km/hr but you were expected to know when that was not a safe speed. You can get pulled over for going that fast if the area is very windy or twisty. We weren't pulled over, but I heard about this later.

Also they have round-abouts all over, and it is something we are only just now getting put in here in Wisconsin. Not only were these traffic circles new to us, two years ago, but they went the "wrong" way around so you had to remember to look in the opposite direction. What a nightmare.

So although we had the flexibility to go wherever we wanted to, whenever we wanted to, it was hard to get there. We had a GPS or probably we'd be there still, trying to figure out where we were!