Driving across England

Rick Steves’ Great Britain says, “Driving in Britain is basically wonderful”.

Driving in Britain isn’t too bad, as long as do do what Rick Steves mentions in the fine print: “avoid what can be an unpleasant grid of one-way streets (as in Bath).”

Here is the route we drove today:

Driving wasn’t too bad once we got out of Bath. Almost immediately we got to see the countryside. Which mainly was sheep and cattle. The closer we got to Scotland, the more the landscape changed.

We’re not in Scotland yet, but we are visiting the Hadrian’s Wall area which during roman times was the border between Roman England and Scotland. Now the actual border is slightly further north. Despite not being Scotland, many people here have Scottish sounding accents.

Here is an example of a two lane road:

The rest areas are not like the ones in Washington. They are little mini malls, with usually 1-2 restaurants, a gas station, bookstore, etc. They all had free wi-fi as well. At one of the stops we brought in the laptop, and I posted all of the Technobabble blogs so far since the Abbey Hotel in Bath never got their wireless working. I scheduled them to come out every 12 hours, so eventually they will catch up to us.

I’ll just take a break here to tell you about something I thought was interesting. There are a lot of Burger Kings here in England. I have not seen one McDonalds. In a five minute walk in Bath we saw four of them. Almost every rest stop has one. We ate at one in Bath just to check it out. It tasted different. The burger wasn’t as good as the ones in the states, but the chicken sandwich was way better.

We took a lot of pictures of the countryside, then went to dinner. The owner of the B&B here was great (Grindon Cartshed). He recommended a place not to far down the road. The place was Battlesteads, and it happened to be the winner of the best pub in Britain. We didn’t know that until we got there.

I’ve made it a point, that when I have a beer on vacation, I can’t the same one again for the duration of the trip. I’ve had some good beers and some bad ones. But at this pub, the bartender recommended a local beer called Magus. It was delicious. I have a new favorite beer, and I can’t get it in the United States. To top it all off, the food was amazing as well.

While at the pub, we met a nice Scottish couple. They explained that Scottish beer is basically “rubbish”, and that we should just drink whiskey while we’re there. I told them that I was a fan of Glenfiddich and they agreed that is was one of the better ones. They then told us the name of a pub that we should check out. It’s where the locals go and said that we’d see a ton of scotch there that we’d never heard of.

Sounds like I have a place I need to visit!