White Knuckles and Gray Hairs

No, I'm not driving a Rolls Royce. But my '96 Toyota does have something in common with this vintage Rolls. The steering wheel is on the wrong side. So is the gear shift. (Yes, apparently I'm a glutton for punishment and have bought a car without an automatic transmission.)

"Just keep the steering wheel in the middle of the road and you'll be fine," say my English friend Lindsay and her husband Bill, helpfully. If only it were that simple. It's not just that they drive on the left here. (Emily corrected me when I called it the "wrong" side of the road, saying it's not wrong, only different.) The roads are narrow. Never mind that there's just enough room for two cars to pass each other. We'll only allow parking on one side of the street. So you'll just have to go around them in the oncoming traffic lane.

Then there's navigating. I think the signage is actually pretty good, it's just hard to read the signs while operating a moving vehicle in unfamiliar territory. Emboldened by a successful trip to the grocery store last week, I set out to meet someone in a nearby town. I had written directions; I'd google-mapped it and carefully studied maps. I was pretty confident setting out for what should have been about an 8 minute trip. Hey, I'm good with maps. I spent 3 summers making trip-tiks at AAA, plotting out people's vacations all over the US and Canada. (Never mind that I don't know how many of those people got lost. My job was just to make the trip-tiks, not make sure they read them correctly.) I'm married to a geographer. Yeah, I'm comfortable with maps and am pretty good with north and south.

So anyway, I missed a turn and it took us nearly an hour to get there. There's no going around the block to correct a wrong turn. There aren't blocks. No grid system whatsoever. A roundabout can be good for making a U-turn, but there's never one around when you need one. And then there's parking once you find the place. Is parking legal? Do you just park in the travel lane, or halfway up the sidewalk? The kids were quite relieved when I put on the emergency brake and announced our arrival, wiping my sweaty palms.

I know I'll get used to it, but for now I have to brace myself each time I pull out of the driveway. The reward is a great sense of satisfaction whenever we arrive at our destination and safely park.