A crash course in driving in the UK

I hit everything but the pace car and it's only because I didn't see one

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Be on the lookout for details about Year 4 of MABA—Make America Burpee Again, an annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day every day in January.

An open letter to whoever “builds” the “roads” in the United Kingdom:

I don’t want to brag but I rented a car in London, drove it around the UK for a week, and returned it not only without crashing it but without even damaging it. I feel like that’s quite an accomplishment considering driving on your roads is like trying to put a piece of thread through the eye of needle only there is no eye and the thread is actually a rope as thick as my fist.

I worded that first sentence carefully. It’s true that I didn’t crash or damage my rental Kona. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. A partial list of things I ran into includes every curb within a five-mile radius of Windsor Castle, shrubs that lined every country road in Wales, a plastic retaining wall and more that I’m forgetting. One time the passenger side mirror got folded in and I’m only 90 percent sure how.

Oh, yeah, now I remember one more. On my first day in England, after having been up for 30 hours, I had to drive through London at rush hour, which was like trying to play bumper cars, catch confetti with tongs and learn a foreign language at the same time. That night, I made it to within a quarter mile of my destination on a road wide enough for one car and maybe a piece of paper on either side if it was cheap paper when suddenly a car came at me from the other direction. I skooched over, my front tire left the road for one inch and clanged off something. It made a sound like someone threw a washing machine down an elevator shaft.

I thought for sure I had broken the car, but somehow, it was fine.

I don’t mean to tell anybody how to run a country, but if I was building roads upon which I expected two cars to drive, I would make them wide enough for two cars. Some of them are barely wide enough for one. I mean seriously look at that photo! That’s a real road in Wales in 2023 upon which cars drive in both directions, and it’s not even the skinniest one I drove on.

GPS showed the speed limit on that road was 60 miles per hour. I doubt that’s accurate, and I didn’t see a sign, probably because there’s no room for one, but it gave me an idea for a business: Sell stickers that say, “American driver,” that way, the people behind me would know I’m not going to go 60 miles per hour on a road barely wide enough for my bicycle. Though the way I was swerving and damn near stopping every time a truck the size of a battleship came at me from the other direction probably gave it away.

I will give credit to the drivers of your country: Y’all are friendly chaps. Especially on your backroads, I often drove way under the speed limit, and nobody ever crowded me or tailgated me or honked at me. If I drove like that in America, I would have been run off the road.

Do you understand that expression, “run off the road?” I doubt it. Here in America, we have what we call shoulders. A shoulder is a strip of pavement, or maybe gravel or grass, that lines the road. On both sides! If you “run somebody off the road,” you force them onto the shoulder.

In your country, the “shoulder” is more often than not an ancient rock wall or a massive shrub (which for all I know is hiding an ancient rock wall).

Wales is beautiful, I’m told, but I didn’t see any of it because the damn shrubs blocked the view, not that I could take my eyes off the string of dental floss you call a road anyway. No joke: My hands and shoulders ached from death-gripping the steering wheel for hours on end.

In the weeks leading up to my trip, I dreaded driving in your country. It wasn’t the other blokes I was worried about, it was me. I thought the problem was going to be driving on the “wrong” side of the road. That actually wasn’t too bad because I talked to myself over and over again about making sure I was on the correct side.

The problem was that the steering wheel was on the “wrong” side of the car. It took me the better part of two days to align my eyes with the right front tire instead of the left. I rented an automatic of course because if I had to drive a stick I would … … … nothavegotten away … … … … … fromHeathrow.

I thought roundabouts would be a drag, too, and they were, at first, when I was driving alone. But a friend rode shotgun after the first day, and he helped me navigate them.

Only once did I walk to the wrong side of the car, but I reached for the seat belt on the wrong side of my body every time but one.

EVERY TIME BUT ONE.

Habits are weird.

Having said all this, I’ll drive on any road you want if there’s fish and chips or Sunday roast at the end of it.

Also: Trying to fit into your parking spots is like trying to fit into clothes that fit me when I was 6.

Cheers,

Matt