Driving in England

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

Driving in Britain is basically unpleasant. Rick Steves does mention in the fine print, “avoid what can be an unpleasant grid of one-way streets (as in Bath).”

It’s assuring that he specifically calls out the city that we’re in as being a bad place to drive. Since my introduction to driving in Britain is in the worst place, maybe the rest of the trip will be cake.
Because of timing issues on our vacation, we needed to get a car to get from Bath to Hadrian’s Wall. Unfortunately the rental car place wasn’t open on Sunday so we had to get it Saturday. They typically deliver the car to you. Except on Saturdays. The reason was that traffic was horrendous on Saturdays, and there is no way they can do that. This means we had to take a train over to the rental car place, grab the car, and find a 24 hour car park.

Driving on the left side of the road is cake. Turning right isn’t even a problem. The issue is that there are countless one way super narrow streets. Because of this, there are cars whizzing by on the opposite side of the street mere inches from the car. Heather was gasping a lot for the first few minutes.. Wait.. never mind, it was the whole time.

Because it took us awhile to find a 24 hour car park (yes I did stop and ask for directions, and yes we had a GPS. It was hopeless), we barely made it to the train station in time to get our tickets to go Cardiff, however….. the machine to get our prepaid ticket absolutely refused to read my credit card, and we had to go into the ticket line. And we missed our train.

This is the soundtrack for this point of the day.

The guy behind the counter was the most absolute nicest man in the world and wrote us a handwritten note to give to the railway staff to let us in and catch the next train. He even stamped it to make it official.

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Once we got to Cardiff, we immediately ran over to Cardiff Castle. Went up in the keep, looked around. And took a tour. Not only does the tour not allow tripods, they don’t allow cameras! But here are some pics from outside (not on the tour)..


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And from the top of the keep

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Then we did the city tour of Cardiff

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Overall a good day. That was our taste of Wales. Tomorrow is the big driving day.

On a side note.. Both Heather and I are big fans of Doctor Who. They didn’t mention Doctor Who or Torchwood despite being filmed here.

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