Driving on the wrong side

When we went to Scotland we didn’t want to stay in Edinburgh all the time – we wanted to see the Highlands, Loch Ness and the Isle of Skye. Therefore we rented a car at the airport of Edinburgh. I had already driven different cars in various countries around the globe but still I was a bit afraid because I never was driving on the left side of the road.

It turned out that this was no big issue; I had to concentrate a bit more in the first minutes but got used to it pretty fast. The only problem existed because we had intentionally booked a small Mini Cooper – the iconic British car – but when we arrived it had had an accident. Europcar gave as an Mercedes-Benz S class instead – the biggest and longest car I’ve ever seen; a real tank.

With this very wide car I hit the kerbstone different times, but it had also a big advantage: it was an automatic car and I didn’t have to learn that the gear shift would have been on the left side. What confused me a bit was the usage of miles instead of kilometers (speed limit: 30 m/hwithin cities, 60 m/h on the countryside and 70 m/h on motorways) – but in the end driving in Great Britain was much easier than I thought. Maybe it’s different if you’re going with your own car to the island, because than you’re sitting on the wrong side; I’ll try this next time.

 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.