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Published: August 13th 2007
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You may have heard about all the floods that hit England recently. Well, as you can tell from the title of my blog, I live in Gloucestershire, which was the worst hit in the recent crisis. I personally didn’t have any flooding (just mushy ground) where I live, but the water treatment plant for a few hundred thousand people was flooded, so we didn’t have any running water for over a week. No drinking water, no showers, and no flushing toilet. My solution? Flee the country.
Well, sort of. I stayed in the UK but boogied it out of England. I rented a car and headed North to Scotland. When I got to the car rental place, I was slightly nervous about driving on the left side of the road in a car where the steering wheel was on the right. Then I saw my zippy little Vauxhall Corsa and discovered that it was a stick shift. Oh, buddy. Let me say here and now that I want to thank Dad and Jim for teaching me to drive a stick shift on the farm and in the abandoned K-Mart parking lot. I still maintain that hitting that lamppost at K-Mart
was not my fault. But I digress.
So, shifting with the left hand. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, though I did reach out with my right hand a couple times when I needed to shift up and hit the door. I hadn’t actually driven a stick in over four years, but apparently, it’s like riding a bike. Another goof: when I got in the first time, I reached for my seatbelt over my left shoulder, which is of course the middle of the car. And I had this pesky habit of bouncing off the left curb every time I made a left turn… but that was just the first day. Thank goodness the pedals were in the same order, as were the gears, or I would’ve been totally done for.
I got on the M5 (the equivalent of an Interstate. I = Interstate. M = Motorway.) in heavy traffic and headed North along the West side of England. Then it started pouring. I just kept thinking, “Left. Left. Go left. Always go left.” Except when you pass on the motorway, because there, the right lane is the fast lane, and it’s illegal to
pass on the left of somebody. Whew. It took me about an hour to get my brain to override habit, but then it stopped raining, and I allowed myself to turn on the bad British pop on the radio.
My first detour was when I saw a sign near Stoke-on-Trent with a picture of a pot on it and the word "Wedgwood." I veered off to the exit and spent about 10 minutes trying to hunt down the next sign in the series. When I got to the end, I found myself at the Wedgwood Factory. Well. I parked the car (whew!) and went inside to the factory store to find my (I mean "our") china pattern, Grosgrain. Unfortunately, once you converted the pounds back into dollars, it wasn't that much cheaper. So I contented myself with waving at lovely Grosgrain and got back on the road.
Once I got past Lancaster into the Lakes District, it was absolutely beautiful, with high green hills dotted with sheep on either side of the car. I passed into Scotland and promptly saw a rainbow. I saw three rainbows in four days in Scotland. They say rainbows are lucky… and since
I was out of the floods and non-flushing toilets, I took them as a good sign each time they showed up. Finally I turned off the major roads and headed Northeast towards Edinburgh, which was to be my home base for the trip. I just felt so spontaneous and free to do whatever. Winding down little roads through cute little towns in gorgeous light. It was well after 8 pm, but since I was so far North, there was still lots of lovely evening lights left. I kept staring out of the window (and occasionally bouncing off the left curb) at the hills and sheep and cows… living in the same field! Together! Anarchy!
Anyway, I got to my destination before dark, Heriot-Watt University, named after George Heriot, goldsmith and philanthropist, and James Watt, improver of the steam engine. (Go-go gadget AP European History!) I had rented a dorm room there, and it was exactly what I needed. A bed, a running shower with hot water, a flushing toilet, an electric teakettle, and cheap. It was about 10 miles from downtown Edinburgh and felt like it was in the middle of nowhere, but it was nice and quiet, and
there was a bus that headed straight downtown from right outside my door. So I took a deliriously hot shower, got in bed with my guidebooks and brochures, planned the next day, and went to bed.
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Josh
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Tracy had the same stick-shift issue when we went, not to mention the clever location of reverse under the knob of the Corsa (think it's the same car we had). I felt the rental company should also have supplied us with a sign for the window indicating that we were Americans. But, then we might have missed out on our first interaction with the people of Scotland--I refer, of course, to an angry Glaswegian we'd accidentally stalled out in front of flipping us the bird.