1.  GPS (or as the Brits call it - Sat Nav) is Required – The road signs in Britain are notoriously sparse, and those that are there can be quite confusing. So unless you want to get hopelessly lost and end up in Norway, and spend half your trip screaming at your copilot, buy a GPS preloaded with maps for the UK. It made our trip infinitely more enjoyable and far less stressful than it could have been otherwise.

2.  We got sheep, and cows, and goats… The UK is a country without borders, or many fences, for that matter. In many places, including alongside major roads, animals roam free, nibbling the grass right up to the edge of the tarmac. Drivers must be vigilant, watching for livestock that has decided to wander into the path of their oncoming car legally traveling at 60mph. The animals also wander the grounds of many tourist attractions, making it necessary for you to watch where you step. It’s all part of the charm.

3.  Roundabouts can be tricky to master and they are everywhere, but they do seem to speed up the exchange of traffic at interchanges. We rarely had to wait at traffic lights, except in major cities, such as Edinburgh.  Though we still had to wait our turn at busier roundabouts, the time we waited almost always seemed infinitely shorter than the time it would have taken to get through a traffic light.
 

4.  Their traffic lights change from Green (go), Yellow (slow/caution), Red (stop), and then back to Yellow before Green. I found this system rather nice, for it gave you time to switch pedals and ease forward (and the manual transmissions time to clutch) before actually accelerating on Green. 

5.  Remembering to drive on the left side of the road is not difficult to master, but it does take time to adjust to driving to the right of your lane so that you don’t drive off the left edge of the road. The first and second day I was constantly bumping the curb or scraping along the hedges that tightly line the side of some of the country roads, and giving my husband heart attacks in the passenger seat. I was far too worried about hitting oncoming traffic, which was made all the more difficult by the fact that…

6.  The vast majority of roads in the UK are extremely narrow when compared with those in the US. The size of one of our lanes on some two-lane highways could easily be the width of a standard two-lane road in the UK. Driving there is not for the faint of heart, especially as the roads twist and turn, and, in the country, frequently shrink to one-lane as they travel over old bridges and through tight points between buildings in villages. When another car is bearing down on you from the other direction going 60mph, and you feel for certain you both won’t fit on the road, it can be a harrowing experience. But you learn to adapt. 

7.  Speed limit signs are few and far between. (Another reason you need a GPS.) There were many times when I was checking the GPS screen to see what speed I was supposed to be traveling because there was no other indication. And if you think you can just follow the traffic around you, think again. Despite all of the speed cameras positioned on the roads across the UK (cameras that take a picture of your back license plate so that the "system" can automatically bill you for your speeding ticket - so helpful) many Brits seem unconcerned with how fast they are traveling. I wasn’t certain whether they didn’t care whether they got a ticket, or if there was some trick I was unaware of for knowing which cameras were working when. The signs indicating that there was a camera nearby did not seem to be much of a deterrent.

8.  Passing is a free flowing art form.  Not only do they pass at the places and times when even we backward Americans pass, they also do it at times when you think there is no earthly way they'll make it.  More than once I thought we were going to be involved in a 10 car pile up because vehicles were passing where there was no room.  I couldn't seem to grasp the rules.  Especially, when it came to motorcycles, which are driven just like in the movies and on video games.  Weaving, dodging, darting.  I thought maybe they'd be better off just driving straight down the center yellow line since they stayed there so much of the time.   

 

And, 9.  Parking is tight, especially in cities, but their method of paying in most of these lots – using Pay-and-Display machines – was infinitely cheaper and more convenient than the standard way it’s done in the US.

In short, an American driver must remember that Great Britain is an old country, tightly packed onto an island. Many of the roads you travel are old carriage lanes that have been there for centuries. The villages that crowd in around these byways have been there just as long, if not longer. Instead of knocking these historic buildings down and forcing the tenants to move, as we often do in the US, the Brits adapted to the road that was there or built one to swerve around the “impediment”. The result, though difficult on novice UK drivers, is beautiful. Lovely, old villages dot the countryside – historic thatch-roofed cottages intermixed with the occasional 21^st century stable (the gas station). Never for a moment can you forget that you are in a very old country evolved into the modern era.