Taking the Low Road

THEY’RE CLEAN, RELATIVELY CHEAP, AND EFFICIENT. Live in a US city east of the Mississippi? You may want to skip this tip, since you probably already know all about it. Live west of the Mississippi? Read on. It’s likely you never, ever, ever take mass transit because it simply doesn’t exist in your part of [...]

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KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED FOR BROWN-AND-WHITE SIGNS. As in the US, there does seem to be some consistency in signposting government-owned or sponsored tourist destinations in these colors. You’ll be surprised how fast your reticular activating system will catch on; you’ll be an expert at spotting brown-and-white signs, no matter how small, by the time [...]

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SIGNS CAN BE TINY AND IN UNEXPECTED PLACES.
 I think that’s because they were originally positioned and sized for foot traffic. Since we Yanks have an aversion to walking, it doesn’t occur to us to look for signage waaaay down low (with pedestrians in mind), and we don’t expect street signage the size of postcards [...]

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SIGNS AREN’T ALWAYS VISIBLE FROM BOTH DIRECTIONS. Get used to rubber-necking it. When you see the back of a sign on the opposite side of the road, as soon as you pass it, quickly whip around and read it. We learned this the hard way on our first trip to Scotland. We must’ve driven the [...]

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STREETS CHANGE NAMES. If you live on our East Coast in an older city or town that sort of evolved higgledy-piggledy over the two or three centuries of our nation’s brief history, then you’re already accustomed to this. We live in the West, where most towns were carefully platted in nice, neat squares. Newly annexed [...]

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JOIN A HOME EXCHANGE PROGRAM – OR SOMETHING SIMILAR. I just happened to learn about a home exchange through a two-paragraph article in Scottish Life Magazine, way back in 1997. (Incidentally, Scottish Life has given me my “hit list” for sites to see on every one of our trips.) When I contacted the exchange coordinator [...]

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Here’s the disclaimer right up front. My husband and I have traveled in the British Isles for a total of 20 weeks. Our tips our strictly our tips; they’re what we learned – sometimes the hard way – from our driving experiences. They’re not a compilation of anything we’ve read in any tour guide or friends’ [...]

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