We - my wife and I and two teenaage sons - are going to England for a week. We’ll be in London for most of the time but we’re considering Liverpool, Oxford, Chester, and the Cotswolds. Should we rent a car or go around by train and bus?
I should mention that I’ve never driven on the left side of the road and that cost is a factor, but not the only factor. It’s more about convenience of getting to and from places efficiently. Also, of course, for the days in London, no way we need our own car.
I consider myself fortunate to live in the Cotswolds and I definitely recommend hiring a car for a visit here. There is a lot to see, depending on your interests, but the attractions are scattered far and wide. (That’s far and wide in English terms - it’s not like Texas or the prairies.) Given your requirements of convenience and efficiency then using buses (if any) or trains (ditto) would be a bad choice.
If you want any advice on a trip up here then please get in touch. I’d be happy to help.
Don’t hire a car while you are in London, but do hire one for travelling around the countryside. However, it seems to me that you are planning to see too much in just one week.
Oxford is car-unfriendly. You probably won’t want one for a day or two in Liverpool, either. And yes, this is a lot for one week! I’d suggest dropping Chester, and perhaps Liverpool as well. If you do this, then it’s an hour by train from London to Oxford, perhaps two nights in the city, then pick up a hire car. And perhaps return it to Heathrow or Gatwick. So you’d only be looking at two or three days’ hire, which shouldn’t break the bank.
Edit: and don’t worry about the whole driving-on-the-left business. Millions of people drive abroad, on the other side of the road to which they are familiar, without a problem.
Although, you may want to spring for an automatic transmission - an automatic is not the default in the UK like it is in the US.
There are some car parks at the edge of Oxford - we left the car there and used buses for the one day we were able to spend there. If you can hire a car with Oxford as a starting point, all the better. The Cotswolds are just a jump to the west from there.
True, but note that it can bump up the price up considerably - a random check on Hertz for a week hire from Heathrow shows the cheapest auto, a Focus, as double the cost of the manual Focus option. Also, as it only represents a small part of any hire company’s fleet, you will have a smaller choice of vehicles, and might find on arrival that you end up with the cheaper manual because no automatic is available, especially if you collect it from a smaller location rather than a main airport. (‘Can’t use a manual transmission’ is a phrase never heard here. Everyone learns to drive with one, because you get a restricted licence otherwise, and as a result most people continue to use them.)
Agree completely. But here in the states I’d guess that the majority of drivers under 35 years of age don’t drive a stick.
Actually, that would make a good poll.
June 2001 - we visited friends who were living in England for 2 years. The lived in Farnham–I think it is SW of London.
We stayed with them a few days. When we drove around I was in the front with my friend so she went over all the driving rules with me.
We rented a car–it was a brand new Mercedes A-class automatic. (sounds more fancy than it was) This was my husband’s idea that we rent a car. They required me to buy the insurance. Oh, I do almost all the driving in our family, which I can’t really explain except my husband does not like driving, he’s better at maps, and I’m a control freak. So I guess I can explain it.
Anyway, drove a few days–out to Salcombe Regis and Ilfracomb and Ironbridge. Drove to Shrewsbury–trying to find a place to park, very tired, lots of traffic towards the end of the day, and I simply forgot who had the right-of-way. That would be the pick-up truck, not me. So I caused an accident with the nicest man in England. It was right down the street from a police station and they clearly were not interested. Several police cars drove by. The man’s truck was not damaged but the rental was smashed in the front. No one was hurt.
The nice man let us use his phone and stayed with us for awhile. Tow truck came, loaded the car on the back, then drove us back to our B&B in Ironbridge. Next day he came back, picked me up, and took me to the rental place.
“Do you have an automatic?” NO. They were mad at me and not inclined to be helpful. I knew how to drive stick, but it was a little more complicated to do it with my left hand. The pedals were the same.
Drove the car back to the Farnham area (can’t remember the name of the town nearby where we rented the car) and that was that. I had to pay what amounted to @ $500 as the deductible.
So if you’re a great driver and you think you can handle the left side thing and the circles, do it. But be really careful. I love traffic circles, but of course going the other direction takes a lot of getting used to.
Driving on the left mostly isn’t a big deal after a pretty short time. The things that really messed with me were:
Driving a stick that was on the left side of me. That was really tough to get used to. My right hand would grope around for something to shift with, and I’d end up using grabbing the turn signal or something equally stupid. This pretty much happen once per day.
Traffic circles. Holy cow, can they be confusing. Once you get used to the signs that explain where to exit the circle to go where you want (they look like circuit diagrams to me), its not so bad.
Left turns; several times I tried to get from the left side of the road to the right when cornering, just out of habit. For some reason right turns were not a problem.
Some towns have medieval layouts, twisty windy roads going no sensible direction. I recall we rented a car in Salisbury to drive around southern England, and had a devil of a time figuring out how to get out of town.
Street signs! There mostly aren’t any in some towns. I remember getting lost in Southampton once. I stopped to get directions at a gas station, and some very very nice people gave me directions – go to street X, and when you get to the circle, bear left (what the heck does “bear left” mean in a circle with 5 exits to it?). I couldn’t find street X, because it wasn’t marked at all. I finally figured out it was the main north/south drag, and just guessed my way from there. Frustrating!
Not true! The thing is, they’re not where you’re used to seeing them, and as a result you might miss them. We have the same problem with signs pointing off posts, or strung over the road - it’s not where we habitually look for them.
That said, a lot of people give bad directions. Bad for people not familiar with the place, at least. Old place names, street names, landmarks and so on persist in the collective memory long after they might have disappeared, changed, or been replaced.
And ‘bear left’ means a direction that’s not quite ‘turn left’ but is not ‘straight on’! Normally it’ll be as you approach a Y-shaped junction from the bottom of the Y.
OK, maybe I should change that to “effectively, there aren’t any signs” since in my experience they were near invisible when they were actually present. What I saw (in Southampton, anyway – this was more than 10 years ago), was sometimes the street was marked by a sign on the side of a building, or written vertically on a post. I think there were other variations, but I’m not sure I remember what they were. In fact, I’m a little vague on the vertical-on-a-post, that might have been a different town.
However, there were intersections in town where I looked high and low and saw no street marking at all (for the cross street – I might see one for the street I was already on). Mind you, this was in town; on major highways, or even country roads, street/road names were very well marked in my experience.
My main thought is that you missed some signs leading up to the junction. It’s worth knowing the A or B numbers of the road you’re after, because these might be the only identifiable feature on the signs - I use them in this way when in unfamiliar place, and www.theaa.com is a good planner for getting accurate descriptions. Having said that, don’t rely on them!
When I rented a car to drive from London to Oxford to the Midlands last September, I got upgraded from a compact to an Audi A6 because they had no other automatics in stock. Which sucked, because country roads are really narrow. I had a choice of driving over the paint or hitting the bushes… at 70 miles an houre.
I agree with squeegee about the lack of street name signs, and I live here. Directions are very off given in terms of street names - “go down Portsmouth Road for half a mile, then left into Wisteria Lane” - but it can be a bugger working which road you are currently on, especially as different stretches of the same road will have different names. In fact, as I have ranted about before, sometimes it is difficult to work out which town or village you are in, if you miss any town name sign on the way in. You can be reduced to squinting at shop fronts as you fly past, hoping for “Little Piddleton Hardware Supplies” or something.
Lack of street names are a pet peeve of mine - generally the signs are only at the start and end of a road and some of them can be extremely long. Fortunately when you’re dealing with that on foot it’s not so bad as you have the luxury of time to get your bearings, and as a non-driver that’s generally what I’m doing.
I’d agree with others that you’re trying to pack in a huge amount in one week, personally I’d say it would be sensible to stick with London then either Oxford OR the Cotswolds, rather than all in one week. London and the Cotswolds would give you a nice experience of the two ends of the English spectrum (super-urban to rolling english countryside) whereas London and Oxford would give you British capital vs regular historical town (and there is quite a big difference, London not being particularly typical of the rest of the country).
Just my 2p.
Oh yeah. Sixteen years living in London and I still get hacked off that a road three miles long will only have nameplates at either end - and at one end there will only be a single sign half-way up a building, while at the other end one sign will be overgrown by someone’s hedge and the sign on the other side will be at pavement level and so rusty as to be illegible. Gaaah! Then factor in the roads that arbitrarily change name four times in a couple of minutes and it’s :mad: all round.
Let’s put it this way - I get by OK in the UK despite never having had a driving licence. It’s occasionally a faff, but it’s manageable, at least in the big towns. Unless you are used to driving cars half the size of what is usual in the US, on roads a third of the size, with everything on the wrong side, while dodging boy racers in riced Nissans and Czech truck drivers who are fiddling with their satnavs, it might be all a bit stressful.
Another vote for The Cotswolds, it’s really beautiful around there, you can get off the motor and just take the B-roads and see the most beautiful villages with lovely stone cottages and thatched roofs. The sorts of views you normally only see on jigsaw puzzles and cake tins!
Plus you can throw in a visit to Stonehenge and/or Avebury, both of which I highly recommend.
Oh, another thing. When you are out in the country some of those small roads have hedges on either side and sometimes only one car will fit through. They have little spots where a car can pull over and wait. But sometimes you might be face to face with another car and one of you has to back up and let the other by. Usually the other person would back up because it would take me so long to figure out what to do. People were pretty nice about that.
I’d like to point out as well that those big hedges have solid stone walls in them, so don’t think if you crash into them you’ll just have to scrape some twigs off anc carry on (you know, in case you were).
Sometimes that is the case. Sometimes it’s just a hedge. Sometimes it’s a ‘Devon Bank’, which is the bestest thing ever. A great big solid thing like a levee, optionally with a solid stone core, and with bushes/grass/stuff growing all over it so it looks just like a hedge. Will give a bulldozer pause for thought, so not ideal to drive into.
The more common problem is usually an overgrown ditch (oops) or metal poles/barbed wire/etc tucked into the hedge. Any and all of these can result in some unintended hilarity when emulating the locals who will each bury the passenger wing-mirror in the hedge on their side and drive past each other at 40mph. Clipping of driver-side wing mirrors in an explosion of glass and plastic is an optional extra.
And the hilarity that ensues when someone towing a caravan encounters another caravan or an unlucky tourist in a rental car they’re not comfortable reversing. :smack: 