Along the not so straight and narrow

Just rolled in the door after spending a few days in Devon attending a wedding and getting in some practice at being terrified while driving through the narrow country lanes.

We hired a car that, by American standards, would be considered a compact but in the UK is classed as a guided missile cruiser with wheels.

I always make it a point to warn my English friends who are traveling to the States not to underestimate the distances between things. A guy in the office recently asked me if I thought that, given a week, he could see The Grand Canyon, Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, San Francisco, Big Sur, Santa Barbara and LA. I said, "Sure, if you're only going to look at them in a book."

Quite the opposite is true in Europe and especially Britain, which is small enough to fit inside Oregon with room left over for all that remains of the Empire. There is a great line in a Fawlty Towers where a visiting American said he couldn't find the main road and instead had to use the “little back street called the M5." A joke which was completely lost on anyone living outside of England.

The English countryside is a baffling maze of hedgerows and single-track lanes. Street signs were banished around the time of the Norman conquest and houses are named, not numbered. First time visitors often find themselves in the dead of night and pounding rain looking for "Broken Coxswain House, near the Thee-headed King's Vicar pub five bridges past Potten End on the left."

I've been driving in the Devon lanes fairly regularly for the past seven years and I have yet to get comfortable with the experience. After frequent encounters with locals barreling down on me from around blind corners I've gotten a bit jittery. On Saturday I was trundling along in second gear when I rounded a bend and came face to face with the grill of a delivery truck. I managed to stop without becoming a hood ornament but was then confronted with the prospect of backing uphill around a corner because Lord knows locals don't reverse for the punters.

I managed to pull it off but in so doing I put a nasty gouge in the left-hand fender . The rental company was more than happy to charge me £151 to fix the damage. Of course by "fix" they mean "wash and send it out again." By that point I was in no mood to argue. I was happy to pay whatever it took to get that miserable beast off my hands. Truth be told, I would have abandoned the goddamn thing in the middle of the motorway if I thought I could have gotten away with it. The longer I spend driving in London traffic, the more I learn to love the London underground.