Taking the Low Road

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 you [...]

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Signs in areas where we Yanks would expect only vehicular traffic may be positioned and/or sized for foot traffic.

The sign scenario I mentioned in Tip #3 was complicated by the fact that the one – and only – sign was about eight inches wide, two inches high, and about 18 inches off the ground. If [...]

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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 same road [...]

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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 properties and [...]

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Join a home exchange program – or something similar.
I just happened to learn about a home exchange through a tiny little article in Scottish Life Magazine, way back in 1997. Turns out that two-paragraph article about a home exchange had been printed without the home exchange director’s permission. Oops. His is a “closed” home exchange, [...]

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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 17 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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