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10 Tips For Planning A Road Trip in Britain

I have a confession. I am quite OCD about planning a road trip.

The first time I went to Britain, back in 1979, I had a trip planned almost quarter hour by quarter
hour. Not quite, but not far off.

I knew exactly what I wanted to see and what time we would get there. I knew in which village pub
we would have lunch and where we would lay our weary heads after another long hard day
enjoying ourselves.

We had been on the road, going sou’-east from London towards Canterbury, having visited Hever
Castle, when I realised that I had hopelessly over-estimated our ability to cover the ground.

Coming from New Zealand I was accustomed to wide-open roads, and only one or two ways of
getting from A to B.

For instance I can travel the 642 km between Auckland in the north of the North Island to
Wellington, at the southern tip, with cruise control set at 103kph. A little over the speed limit, but
well within the tolerances allowed by our road police. I cover that distance in just under 8 hours of
steady driving, stopping only once to refuel and grab a pie and a bottle of iced coffee.

In Britain you would have trouble doing that average on the motorway system, let alone the
pretty little country roads.

Before we made it to Canterbury the editing pencil had gone to work on the itinerary. About half of
the things I had planned on seeing were now on the road trip equivalent of the cutting room floor.

The British roadimg system is a mad tangle

The British roading system is a tangle of M roads, A roads, B roads, country roads, and lovely little
lanes that go nowhere at all.

It’s not helped by the fact that the Brits are fairly easy-ozey about helpful things like street signs. If
they are there at all (usually not) they are hard to see.

“Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.”

G.K.Chesterton’s poem is right on the mark. It is like trying to navigate in the highway equivalent of
a plate of spaghetti. The result is lost time, lost experiences, frustration generally, not to mention
those, err, umm, “quiet times” ‘twixt driver and navigator.

The problem is that there are usually several ways of getting from one place to the other. Your
GPS will get you from here to there (most times – but not always), but it won’t pick the best way.