Driving in England

Go Krissy! Glad to hear that you are that much closer to traveling to England! I know we've traded some emails on the subject of driving in the UK, but the main thing to remember is don't crowd the left side of the road, which Americans and other right-hand drivers tend to do. Keep toward the center line as much as possible--it will become much more natural after only a couple of hours on the roads. If you are not comfortable driving a manual transmission, you will have to opt for an automatic, which is pricier. The bottom line is that driving in the UK is not all that hard and after a day, I'm sure you will be quite at ease! 

Rob! I have those emails saved for when it gets down to the wire!! (thank you sooo much for your help!)

My Sammie thinks I'll be able to do it....maybe I should have some faith in myself!! LOL!

Happy New Year, Ron and Anna!

Hi Krissy!  I'm so excited for you, I hope you go!!

As for the driving, I think Toby gave excellent advice.  You definitely DON'T want to drive around the bigger towns.  And the GPS sat nav would be most helpful, because sometimes the signage isn't clear.  David did most of the driving over there, and he got used to it fairly quickly.  We put on over a thousand miles in a week, last time we were there.  I kind of white knuckle it, simply because you really have to concentrate at first.  We were lucky that our first driving experience over there was outside Knock Airport in West Ireland, which is out in the country, so we had a chance to get the feel of the car in a fairly unbusy area.  It's a real trip when you get in the driver's seat on the right side of the car for the first time. 

The biggest shock was the narrowness of the roads.  The A roads (at least where we were) are very narrow, and there are no shoulders.  And the Bs are even narrower.  The hedgerows in the fields come right up to the edge of the road.  So that means (and it happened several times to us) if you take a wrong turn, you may have to drive many miles before you find a place to turn around.  So that's another good reason for the Sat Nav.  But all in all, it's great fun and I'm sure you'll do fine.

The only other thing I would caution you about it the distances.  It takes a lot longer than you might think.  Figure an hour for every 30 miles of distance.

We booked our car through Auto Europe.

http://www.autoeurope.com/

They were great!  We even picked up our car in York a day early and they were able to get it arranged.

Krissy, we booked our train travel thru RailPass.com.  They have discount deals for 4, or 7, or 14 or whatever, days of travel.  The dates can be consecutive or non-consecutive.  We also used them to buy Oyster cards for the London buses and tubes, that you can just add money, to if need be.

Here's another tip - if you choose to travel by train, go light.  The last thing you want to do is have to schlep some big monster suitcase(s) on and off the buses and trains.  We traveled on Ryan Air between England and Ireland and they had a 33lb. weight limit on checked bags, and it cost and extra $11 for every 2.2 lbs over 33.  So we did it.  And we were over there for 16 days, so it really is possible.