...Scotland, and roughly 35% of the world's population (according to Wikipedia), drives on the left side of the road. According to this same wikipedia entry, the "keep left" rule of traffic can be traced back to the ancient empires of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians. This is entirely irrelevant to modern traffic, but it does make for a nice segue into talking about why I was driving around Scotland in the first place.
I've already mentioned how trains are both prevalent and actually pretty great in the UK and Ireland, and buses are quite common and handy for getting around the countryside to the major tourist destinations. The Falkirk Wheel, one of my destinations, is no exception to this.
The Antonine Wall, on the other hand...that requires a bit more personal navigation.
I had never heard of the Antonine Wall until a friend posted about it on my Facebook wall. I HAD heard of the more-famous Hadrian's Wall, but the remains of that particular Roman fortification were much further south than I planned to be during my trip. The Antonine Wall, on the other hand, ran perfectly along the route I was taking from Glasgow to Falkirk. The only catch was that trains and buses didn't per se stop at the spots I needed them to stop at, and due to timing it would take far too long to get to the Falkirk Wheel and back.
A rental car seemed like a great idea.
Here's something I want to explain about myself. For all that I love video games, blogging, graphics design, and all kinds of sci-fi future schlock, in my personal life I lag about 10 years behind in technology. My phone is an outdated disaster that charmingly imitates the fancy features of its betters (a touchscreen, a flip-open keyboard) but contains none of the genuinely useful things like, say, internet access. I own a Macbook, but it is about 6 years old now, which in tech terms means it might as well be a museum piece.
When it comes to navigation, I like to make use of these things called maps. Maps are great. You can find all kinds of neat things on them...roads...towns...other things. They have this one teeny-tiny problem, however. You cannot read them while you are driving.
BUT! I felt confident that I could make do, since when I arrived at the car rental facility, I discovered their only GPS on site was non-functional. Apparently I had chosen my rental facility poorly. This was a part of Glasgow where people renting cars generally use them for utilitarian purposes like moving furniture, instead of for silly things like transporting oneself over a distance too far to be walked.
Thus, I set out with no GPS, determined to prove that the old ways are still the best (and if not the best, then at least tolerable). At first, everything went brilliantly, if terrifyingly. I found the first major site of the Antonine Wall on my planned route, in Bearsden, and successfully smashed into the curb with sufficient force to put me up onto the sidewalk before parallel parking properly. Let me back up a bit.
Driving on the opposite side of what you're used to is the worst. I'm not just talking about the road, I'm talking about sitting in a chair that is on the other side of a little compartment that feels familiar yet completely foreign. Rental cars are a somewhat dodgy proposition to begin with. Each vehicle has it's own kind of feel to it: the acceleration, the sight lines, the handling...now add to that unfamiliarity the unique feeling of being told to unlearn everything you know about the directions you look, the hand you use to shift gears, the position of the controls...EVERYTHING.
I drove an automatic transmission and I bruised my knuckles on the door three times reaching for a gear shift that wasn't there. I continuously looked left, then right, several times almost missing oncoming traffic. I ran OVER roundabouts instead of going, well, around them.
And, after Bearsden, I got lost no less than SIX. TIMES.
I'd like to be able to attribute this solely to my misadventures with maps and not having a functioning GPS, but the truth is that it was equally due to my brain having to focus intently on not veering into oncoming traffic. It's hard to look for the proper exit in a figure-eight roundabout when you're just trying to prevent yourself from becoming a personal reenactment of Death Race 2000. The REMAKE.
It was by divine providence alone that I managed to make my way back from Falkirk via Loch Lomond to Glasgow in time to return the rental vehicle. I am so not even joking. My navigation system was by this point worn down to a method not unlike that of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently, who pursues a technique of "zen navigation." Dirk Gently latches on to vehicles that appear to know where they're going; he might not always end up where he needed to, but he always ends up somewhere interesting. For me, I relied on pursuing streets that "looked like they belonged to the kind of area where you rent a car for utilitarian purposes like moving instead of silly reasons like driving around a country that you've never been to and oh my God what was I thinking not getting a GPS." And somehow, it worked. I returned the car with two minutes to spare.
I have literally no idea if people who grew up in the UK have this same problem when they travel to North America, but I can't see how they couldn't. When you learn to drive, it becomes such an automatic part of your life that you don't even think consciously about it any more. Maybe that's dangerous. Maybe it's good that I got a bit shook up, and found that I still have a lot to learn about getting around, especially in another country.
Or maybe, just maybe, I'll take a cab next time.
I've already mentioned how trains are both prevalent and actually pretty great in the UK and Ireland, and buses are quite common and handy for getting around the countryside to the major tourist destinations. The Falkirk Wheel, one of my destinations, is no exception to this.
The Antonine Wall, on the other hand...that requires a bit more personal navigation.
A rental car seemed like a great idea.
Here's something I want to explain about myself. For all that I love video games, blogging, graphics design, and all kinds of sci-fi future schlock, in my personal life I lag about 10 years behind in technology. My phone is an outdated disaster that charmingly imitates the fancy features of its betters (a touchscreen, a flip-open keyboard) but contains none of the genuinely useful things like, say, internet access. I own a Macbook, but it is about 6 years old now, which in tech terms means it might as well be a museum piece.
When it comes to navigation, I like to make use of these things called maps. Maps are great. You can find all kinds of neat things on them...roads...towns...other things. They have this one teeny-tiny problem, however. You cannot read them while you are driving.
BUT! I felt confident that I could make do, since when I arrived at the car rental facility, I discovered their only GPS on site was non-functional. Apparently I had chosen my rental facility poorly. This was a part of Glasgow where people renting cars generally use them for utilitarian purposes like moving furniture, instead of for silly things like transporting oneself over a distance too far to be walked.
Thus, I set out with no GPS, determined to prove that the old ways are still the best (and if not the best, then at least tolerable). At first, everything went brilliantly, if terrifyingly. I found the first major site of the Antonine Wall on my planned route, in Bearsden, and successfully smashed into the curb with sufficient force to put me up onto the sidewalk before parallel parking properly. Let me back up a bit.
Driving on the opposite side of what you're used to is the worst. I'm not just talking about the road, I'm talking about sitting in a chair that is on the other side of a little compartment that feels familiar yet completely foreign. Rental cars are a somewhat dodgy proposition to begin with. Each vehicle has it's own kind of feel to it: the acceleration, the sight lines, the handling...now add to that unfamiliarity the unique feeling of being told to unlearn everything you know about the directions you look, the hand you use to shift gears, the position of the controls...EVERYTHING.
I drove an automatic transmission and I bruised my knuckles on the door three times reaching for a gear shift that wasn't there. I continuously looked left, then right, several times almost missing oncoming traffic. I ran OVER roundabouts instead of going, well, around them.
And, after Bearsden, I got lost no less than SIX. TIMES.
I'd like to be able to attribute this solely to my misadventures with maps and not having a functioning GPS, but the truth is that it was equally due to my brain having to focus intently on not veering into oncoming traffic. It's hard to look for the proper exit in a figure-eight roundabout when you're just trying to prevent yourself from becoming a personal reenactment of Death Race 2000. The REMAKE.
It was by divine providence alone that I managed to make my way back from Falkirk via Loch Lomond to Glasgow in time to return the rental vehicle. I am so not even joking. My navigation system was by this point worn down to a method not unlike that of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently, who pursues a technique of "zen navigation." Dirk Gently latches on to vehicles that appear to know where they're going; he might not always end up where he needed to, but he always ends up somewhere interesting. For me, I relied on pursuing streets that "looked like they belonged to the kind of area where you rent a car for utilitarian purposes like moving instead of silly reasons like driving around a country that you've never been to and oh my God what was I thinking not getting a GPS." And somehow, it worked. I returned the car with two minutes to spare.
I have literally no idea if people who grew up in the UK have this same problem when they travel to North America, but I can't see how they couldn't. When you learn to drive, it becomes such an automatic part of your life that you don't even think consciously about it any more. Maybe that's dangerous. Maybe it's good that I got a bit shook up, and found that I still have a lot to learn about getting around, especially in another country.
Or maybe, just maybe, I'll take a cab next time.