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Published: October 13th 2007
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We had prearranged to hire a car from Salisbury and were aiming to travel all the way to York on this day in order to catch back up to our revised schedule after spending a few extra days with Ed and Ellen. This was quite a long drive.
As per our revised plan, we headed into the town of Oxford for lunch. It was really difficult finding anywhere within the town to park for free! We noticed that there are signs advising you to park in large carparks off the ring road which encircles the town and then catch a bus into the town centre, but as we were pressed for time we ignored these. After not finding any on-street parking anywhere near the town centre we ended up parking in some dodgy free spaces in what appeared to be the railway station carpark. However it may have been that these spaces were only meant to be for railway staff. Luckily we didn't receive any fines or worse had our wheels clamped!
After finally parking the car, we wandered through the city streets past the hoards of uni students. We went to the impressive Christ College where parts of
some of the Harry Potter movies were filmed. There are many other colleges also in Oxford, but these were not open to tourists. It seemed like it may have been the English equivalent of our "O Week" judging by some of the signs we saw around the town.
After we left Oxford we continued towards York, stopping off briefly at Silverstone where the British Grand Prix is held each year. Unfortunately Red Bull and Renault were testing on that day so we were not able to get onto the circuit.
We left Silverstone and were then hit with massive traffic congestion near the town of Northampton. We heard a number of radio reports about an incident where a lorry (the English word for truck) caught fire and caused the M1 motorway to be closed in both directions between junctions 16 and 18. The announcements then went on to say that all nearby alternative routes were clogged with traffic which we were in the middle of. This was a major problem for us and caused us to be delayed for more than an hour as each alternative route that we chose turned out to be no good. Eventually we detoured through the town of Northampton and found a route to get us back to the M1 past the incident. Due to the delay, we didn't end up making it to York that night, and ended up stopping short at a town called Rotherham.
In general on our first day of driving, we found the major roads in England to be very congested even though they were a long way away from the capital. We also found on-street parking to be very scarce in town centres and we found directional signage to be very confusing. All routes are marked by route numbers rather than route names, this goes for directional signs, radio announcements and street directories, and differs from Victoria where only the directional signs in country areas are designated by route numbers in a misguided attempt to copy the system in the UK (despite the fact that few of the locals actually refer to the Victorian numbers).
The biggest problem we found with the route numbering system in the UK is that there are too many numbered routes which can have up to four digit numbers each and a prefix of either M, A or B. It then gets very confusing as to which number is which especially as many roads share multiple route numbers and there is a lack of consistency between consecutive signs in relation to whether all the shared route numbers are shown.
There also appears to be a major overuse of roundabouts in the UK. Just about every major road junciton is controlled by large roundabouts outside of town centres. The roundabouts generally have large foliage in the centre island so that you can't see through to the other side and have a large number of legs that intersect at funny angles other than 90 degrees. Generally there are only two directional signs which appear before each roundabout, the first has the main destinations on it and the following sign has secondary destinations but not the main destinations. This means that there is no reassurance if you miss the first sign as the town signs are different. The only other directional signs you get are when you are exiting the roundabout and these signs don't always match the initial signs so you are left wondering which exit to take. It was all very confusing!
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