| Subject: Re: Scotland |
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Linda, this article was very enjoyable, especially Driving in Edinburgh is
a bit like being the ball in a gigantic Scottish pinball machine. Unless you
know exactly where you're going you tend to get funneled down one-way
streets, pushed along by traffic into taking corners you didn't necessarily
want, and being forced into long detours past the city's many historic sites
and landmarks.
A couple of years ago, 3 co-workers and myself spend a few days in Edinburgh for a meeting. On the weekend, we wanted to go to the city centre for some sightseeing, and thought that parking in the St. James hotel/shopping mall would be convenient. I was the driver (with a fair amount of left-side driving experience, and the others were navigators. We approached the St. James on the opposite side of the street from the car park entrance, and there was an iron fence running down the length of the street, so crossing over was not an option. We figured that with a few turns we could get back there on the correct side. After 3 attempts at making elaborate figure-eights around the city, every route brought us back to the same spot. It was really quite amusing. We finally voted that I take one of the turns open to buses only (I did have 3 passengers, after all), and this turn allowed us to break the cycle, and get where we wanted to be. Later that week, when everyone else had left for the states and I stayed behind to drive to England to visit my wife's relatives, I found the one elusive (and legal) turn that I could have taken to go directly to the car park. -steve, in So Califoria, where the gasoline prices are again heading toward UK prices, though not there yet... |