Driving U.K. style

Here’s our new car:

It’s a Ford Focus 1.6 Zetec and so far it has been great.

Driving in the U.K. has been interesting. First, everything is backwards; I walk to the wrong side of the car to get in at least every other day. I usually pretend I meant to go to that side and put a bag on the passenger seat, or something like that. Then I walk back around to the other side and get in. I have to say that shifting gears with my left hand was not nearly as hard as I anticipated it would be. And I haven’t driven on the right side of the road yet; the one time I drove the wrong way down a one way street, I was at least on the left side!  I always look the wrong way when walking across the street, though.

Petrol (gas to us yanks) is horribly expensive. I just filled up the car with about 50 litres of gas, which at 94 pence per litre works out to be about $94 to fill up the tank. Ouch!

The roads here are quite narrow. I think most of them haven’t been widened since the days of horse-drawn carriages. And it seems that you can park just about anywhere. So imagine a really narrow road with cars parked on both sides of it with lots of people driving really fast in and out of the parked cars.  Yee haw!

There is a roundabout at almost every intersection.  Mostly I love roundabouts.  I’d much rather keep driving, even slowly in a circle, than stop at a red light.  They can get confusing, especially the bigger ones with stop lights at intervals around the circle.  Watch out if you get in the wrong lane before you go into one of these.  Sometimes there’s even two roundabouts joined together to make a figure eight.