Driving in the UK!

The Gates to Elm Farm


Yesterday, June 22, we ventured forth in two rental cars toward Bath and Stonehenge for the day. The willing Princeton and I were picked up by the car rental company in a little van and taken to the rental office in nearby Littlehampton. Then we had to drive back to the house and pick up the students - but our gates to Elm Farm are very, very narrow and impossible to enter or exit, so we had to park across the street and load the students in.



Princeton had no trouble in his compact car that held a total of 5 people, and I had seven total in our little Vauxhall wagon. So off we went, a little slowly at first, with designated navigators in each car, Prince with Nicole Warburton and I with Kathy Lovin. Roundabouts are a real popular traffic-flow manager here, and they are incredibly dangerous - remember, everything is now on the left, but the driving column and steering wheel are on the right. Instead of traffic going counterclockwise through a roundabout, as it does in the Northeast US, it goes clockwise here.

Both Princeton and I had stick shifts, and I was having trouble getting the car to start up in 1st gear, finding the ratio between the clutch and the gas pedal to be really strange. I had to give it a LOT of gas to get it to go, so I was dreading stopping and having to start up in first gear every time. After about 40 minutes, we were driving through Chichester and one of the girls in the back of my car said, "The car is smoking"....whereupon I immediately pulled over and ordered everyone to evacuate the car immediately. We waited and waited, and the smoke subsided. I called the rental company and told them that the clutch was a problem in the car and it had started smoking. Being the generous and lovely car rental agent that he was, he immediately said, "Oh, you mean you've burned out the clutch, then." I said, "No I have NOT burned out the clutch; it does not function correctly."

So we called the British equivalent of AAA to come and see if they could help. A nearby guy had meanwhile helped us push the car into a parking spot so it was out of the road. The AAA driver was lovely. He said there was nothing wrong with the car and asked if I had ever driven a shift before. I told him I had a Toyota stick shift for many years and had learned to drive in a VW bus with a stick shift. So I asked him to observe me driving the car and we discovered that what I thought was first gear, was in fact, third. I had not pushed the stick shift to the left far enough to get it to first gear, and had been trying to start up from a dead stop in third gear. Of course, that took lots of gas, and eventually the transmission started to smoke! I felt like an idiot. But the car was still usable, so we continued on.

Meanwhile, Princeton and the other students were far ahead of us and they arrived in Bath in time to take in the tourist sights. We drove in about 1.5 hours later and though the baths were closed for the evening we could take in the lovely city, and see the cathedral and walk the streets. We all had a great dinner of fish and chips in Bath, and then drove back via Stonehenge which was an amazing sight to see at sunset.

The students were exhausted after a long day of worrying about navigating each car through unfamiliar territory, and Princeton and I were absolutely shattered. But we both now know how to drive in England!