December 2001: England and Wales

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This is the first part of a trip that also included France.

Saturday, December 1: I got to LAX around 4:45 PM for a 6:25 flight to London. LAX was the most deserted I had ever seen it. There was one person in line at each of the three X-Ray machines at the security checkpoint. Of course, I managed to get behind the slowest one of the three.

It was very crowded back at the gate, however, and the plane (a 777) was completely packed. This was my third or fourth time on a 777 and I am convinced now that they have the most uncomfortable seat of any plane. The back does not have good support and there is that box underneath the seat in front of you for the TV monitors. It makes it so you cannot stretch your legs out.

About the only good thing is everyone does have their own TV monitor. There were 20 some channels to choose from, including seeing the movies dubbed in various European languages. Planet of the Apes sucked even worse in French than it did in English. Somehow the apes just did not seem as fierce speaking French. It is nice to be able to flip back to the map and check out the progress of the flight. It was clear over most of western U.S. and I caught a great view of Denver.

As we got close to the Gulf Stream, we picked up a huge tailwind. It was blowing over 150 MPH all of the way across the Atlantic. We were scheduled to arrive at 12:50 PM Sunday, but got in way early at 11:25 AM instead. The pilot came on and said he checked and the record for LA to London was 8 hours and 53 minutes. So we just missed it at 9 hours flat. If we had not had to circle once before landing, we might have broken it.

It was nice to get to circle like that, though, and view the countryside. I think one of the charming things is how asymmetrical everything is. The fields are all sorts of weird shapes and the roads just wind every which direction. Not like the boring grids you see in the U.S.

Sunday, December 2: By the time I got through customs and took the shuttle bus to the rental car and filled out all the paperwork, it was 13:00 (Europe uses that 24-hour clock, you know). I was ready to hit the road for my first time driving on the wrong (I mean left) side of the road. I made sure I was concentrating, using both hands, radio off to avoid distractions.

I got a couple of miles down the road though, and a funny squealing noise starting coming from the car. I thought I might have to turn around and take it back when I realized that the valet who had brought the car up had put the parking brake on. Why anyone would ever put the parking brake on for an automatic is beyond me. (I figured I did not want to learn how to drive a stick with my left hand, so I rented an automatic. The majority of cars in Europe are manual, though, because of the high price of gas, so you have to make sure you specify an automatic when renting one).

Anyway, once the parking break was off, the car ran fine. So I started picking up the pace a little bit. The speedometer said 60, and I was thinking, 60 km/hr is not all that fast. Then I realized that the speedometer was in miles per hour. I was going 60 MPH on this 4-lane city street. Fortunately, it was just then that I made it to the M4 motorway. I got on heading west towards Cardiff. I did not see any speed limit signs so I just stayed in the slow lanes, not wanting to pass anyone just yet. That's when I began to notice that all of the road signs were in miles. I had been in England briefly a year and a half ago and noticed that some of the signs had miles on them, but I always assumed they used kilometers. Nope. They have some weird mix of metric and English that is more screwed up than our system.

I went about 30 miles west on the M4 and I was getting pretty confident in my driving so I stopped at a service plaza. There was a board there that showed the local tourist attractions and I had a good atlas in the car so I got off at the next exit. At first I was on a dual carriageway (equivalent of a divided highway in U.S.). Then I got off of that and onto a 2-lane highway, where I started to encounter my first roundabouts. I missed the turn for Dottington Castle so I learned pretty quickly that roundabouts are great for making U-turns. The road back to the castle was this country lane definitely not wide enough for 2 cars, where you could not see far around the curves at what might be coming from the other way. That made me a little nervous. Fortunately, it was not very far back to the castle.

This is typical of most castles in England. All that is left is mostly ruins. Here just the guard tower at the main gate was all that was left intact. You can see where the walls of the rest of the castle used to stand.

I saw some other tourist attractions on the atlas, including some archaeological sites, so I continued west on this 2-lane highway called the A4. I saw a sign for a windmill, and saw that on that map. I always liked Don Quixote/Man of La Mancha, and I never saw a giant antiquated windmill before. The map showed that on the way to the windmill was this Chisbury Chapel, so I went for a driving adventure on some back country roads. It was a good thing I had a compact, because the tires were off of the pavement whenever another car went past from the other direction, and there was no shoulder.

I never did find the windmill. Where the sign ended up pointing turned into this dirt two track, so I decided that was too much of a driving adventure without a 4x4. I did spot this interesting looking canal lock, though, so I took a picture of it. This was quite a ways from the ocean, so I had not expected to find anything like that. But I guess these were the freeways of the industrial revolution, hauling coal and goods on barges all the way to the sea.

I had missed the chapel on the way, but spotted it on the way back. By then (16:30, or 4:30 PM) it was really starting to get dark. Between the chapel and my return to the A4, a couple of the largest deer I have ever seen crossed the road in front of me. I stopped to take a look and I am sure they were at least 10 if not 12-point bucks. Unfortunately, it was too dark to get a picture.

I continued west on the A4 through 4 or 5 more towns (and lots of roundabouts) until I found a shortcut back to the M4 motorway. Then I continued west on it past Cardiff to junction 35, near the city of Bridgend. This was about 150 miles west of London, give or take.

There I checked in to this supposedly modern inn. It was OK. It had this steam radiator towel warmer thing that I had never seen before, but it did not have a phone in the room (there was just a common phone down the hall). So much for dialing up the modem on the laptop to check email.

Tuesday, December 4: Monday through Wednesday I worked at the offices of a reseller of our software. They are located in Llaharan. The double-L is not pronounced like a Y as in Spanish. It is the Gaelic hard guh sound. I really had trouble understanding the Welch accent of a lot of people.

Monday was a long day of work and I did not have time to do anything, but Tuesday night I drove over to this town called Porthcawl. It is a tourist/resort town on the ocean. Unfortunately, it being off-season, all of the shops closed at 5, but it was nice to walk around the downtown. I did have a really good dinner at an Indian restaurant. There are all sorts of Indian restaurants all over Great Britain, what with them once having been a colony.

Wednesday, December 5: I finished up in Wales and hit the road Wednesday night to head for Milton Keynes. It is northwest of London but I did not see any good place to cut across so I took the M4 all of the way back to the M25, which loops around London, then I took that north to the M1 and then to Milton Keynes. By then I was a pro at driving on the left, and I was listening to the radio and spending a lot of time passing in the fast lanes.

I was booked at the Cock Hotel in Stony Stratford, an older neighborhood of the city. I checked in about 10:30. I thought the name of the hotel was a little strange, and the dimensions even stranger. The door leading down the hall to my room was about 5'6” tall with a sign on it that said “Mind Your Head”. The town was very pretty, though. It was a nice clear night and I thought I would take some pictures of the Christmas lights, but they shut them off before I got a chance.

Thursday, December 6: Thursday and Friday I worked with Marcus and Scott at Mitsubishi. They are a couple of the best blokes I have ever worked with. We traded all sorts of funny stories about our customers.

They also explained the relevance of the name of the Cock Hotel. It seems a couple of doors down is where the Bull Hotel is, and back in the past rival political parties would hang out in the hotels and in the hotel bars and spread nasty rumors about the other party. That is where the expression Cock and Bull Story originated.

They also told me how Milton Keynes was the new, modern city in Great Britain. They planned it like a U.S. city, with a rectangular grid of streets. So much for charm. American culture really is pervasive, but I must admit, it was nice to find a shopping mall. Thursday night I walked all around and did some shopping at The Centre, which is a huge, U.S. style shopping mall in the center of Milton Keynes. Then I went back to Stony Stratford and had another great dinner at an Indian restaurant. After that I hoisted a pint of bitter at the Cock Bar, and finally walked around and took some pictures. The weather was quite mild for the entire week, with temperatures in the 40s.

Friday, December 7: I drove back to Heathrow so that I could stay near the airport for my early flight the next morning. Traffic was heavy coming out of London but not bad going towards the city, and I made it to Heathrow in less than an hour.

I checked into the Holiday Inn, and dropped my bags off in the room. It was a nice room, but I could not seem to turn any of the lights on. I tried all the switches that I could find (it was hard to find them in the dark). Finally I had to call down to the front desk and, feeling stupid, ask them how to turn the lights on. It turns out there is slot on the wall by the door where you have to insert and leave your keycard in order to get the lights to work. That was a first for me.

Then I returned the rental car. In all, I had gone 560 miles. Driving on the left actually felt quite natural. Maybe having the steering wheel on the right just mirrors everything in your brain. The pedals and turn signal and all that are on the same sides as in the U.S., though, so not everything is mirrored. My worst mishap was leaving the parking brake on when I first arrived. I did go to get in on the wrong side three times, and I did have to concentrate when pulling out of driveways and turning right to make sure I looked both ways and turned into the correct lane. But no one ever honked at me, and I don't think I ever cut anyone off. And the motorways are a pleasure to drive because you don't get any slow drivers in the fast lanes. Everyone always keeps left except when passing, and then immediately gets back over after passing. It is amazing how much smoother traffic flows as a result.

Gas was 80p (80 pence) per liter (I told you they mixed metric and English. Try figuring out your gas mileage). The exchange rate was about 1.45, so that’s about $4.40 per gallon. That's with gas cheap here in the U.S. now. Imagine the price back in the summer.

The rental car return was about a mile from the Holiday Inn, so I decided to walk back to get some exercise. I stopped for dinner on the way (this great grilled salmon and vegetables). Then I spent most of the night writing postcards, got about an hour of sleep, and got up at 4AM to catch a taxi to the airport at 4:30 for my 6:30 flight. Maybe I should have just spent the night in Heathrow, and not bothered with a hotel.

This rest of the story continues in France.