Left Side, Left Side

Left side, left side.It’s the mantra Casey and I repeat to ourselves whenever we’re in the driver’s seat. When we first arrived here, we never would’ve thought driving could cause us so much angst. After all, we had some decent leftie experience under our belt. We’d spent 2 years in road-inverted New Zealand, and nearly mastered the art of Kiwi traffic circles and fusilli-shaped country roads. We'd braved the kamikaze kangaroos of the Australian Outback and the death-like “whoosh” of the road trains at dusk and dawn in a rental car. But the Aussies and Kiwis are no match for the English when it comes to leftie roads.

There are lots of people in the U.K., which means crowded roads. You have little time for mistakes because there’s always a car following closely behind. Also, many Brits drive standard transmissions, which can be lots of fun. But when there’s a line of speed demons in pursuit, negotiating the stick shift is a maddening distraction for the newbie. Oh, and many country roads are one lane and sandwiched between 600 year old hedgerows, so visibility is poor.

Sometimes the pure abundance of English road signage hinders passage from point A to B. Some signs just don't make sense. Changed priorities ahead, reads a road sign in Bristol. Says who? You gonna make us?

Casey summed things up nicely. It's no surprise, he said, that after traveling thousands of miles across the Arabian sands with the Bedouins to fight a war against the indomitable Turks, Lawrence of Arabia met his demise on an English road. OK, so maybe Casey didn't exactly say it like that. Of course, as my Mom would say, Lawrence shouldn't have been on one of those God darned motorcycles.