Living in London

We took to the roads of England for the first time today. Following the advice of many other expats who have made the transition from driving on the right hand side to driving on the left, we rented a car and headed out of town for a little trial trip. We made our way into the southwest countryside with Stonehenge as our destination. Seven hours, 200 miles, a wonderful lunch, and some big stones later, we are home safe and sound.

Driving for the first time in England was intense to say the least, and not quite in the ways we had feared. It’s not that weird to sit on the right side of the car or to have the shifter on the left (we did get an automatic). We didn’t feel as if we were learning to drive all over again or anything like that.

The weird stuff is what’s stored in our ‘muscle memory.’ There are patterns and habits that are so deeply ingrained that we had to focus perpetually in order to ‘override’ our instincts. One example is having our body on the right side of the lane – we have such a deep instinct to align our body with the left side of the lane that we constantly had to fight the car drifting to the left (so that our line of sight is where it used to be).

Another example is looking in the rear view mirror, previously located up and to the right. Today we rarely checked the rear view mirror in our British car. Instead, we found ourselves looking constantly into the right hand side mirror — even when we were in the right hand passing lane and the right side mirror showed nothing but the shoulder of the road.

We are home now and none the worse for wear. Our shoulders are a little tense, which is undoubtedly a combination of the stress of driving in England for the first time and the wonderful ergonomics and quality of the seats in our Ford Focus.