Driving for 10 days on the wrong side of the road in Scotland was really stressful, I think partly because I’ve been driving since age 14, over half a million miles of doing it one way. Ingrained habits…
I picked up a car in Edinburgh and was immediately terrified in the “roundabouts.” Cars pouring in from 4 directions, weaving in and out. “Give way to the cars on your right,” said Diana, and I used this as a mantra in the roundabouts. I ended up driving the last 2 days in a part of Scotland (near Irvine) that was peppered with roundabouts. Sheesh! I got better with experience, but it was still stressful..
The cabbie on the way to the airport navigated them smoothly, hardly slowed down.
It’s such a relief to be back the right (sic) side of the road.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
I spent a week in England and had the same experience. The narrow road walled in by high hedges were more a concern than the round-abouts. We're starting to get more and more round-abouts here in US, but they no longer terrify me.
We entered a roundabout in Edinburgh and went around about 4 times before we could get out. We also thought the Scots were nice on a one lane road when they pulled over to let us pass..until we realized they pulled over for the car that was meeting us head-on. It was embarrassing.