Driving me Crazy

I am lucky enough to have been loaned a car while I'm here, which is great as trying to get around is otherwise almost impossible. The nearest train station is 10 miles away and the busses run once an hour, as long as they don't break down. I don't think I've ever seen such an old fleet of busses that aren't London Routemasters. The newest one I've seen so far is 1994! 

So the car has been a god send but driving here is a bit of a nightmare. Firstly the roads are all a little on the narrow side, driving down what is allegedly a main road and not being able to see what's ahead because of all the hedgerows and trees is a bit worrying. Actually they probably aren't that narrow but after living in Kalgoorlie, where every street is as wide as a freeway, they sure seem to be. However some of them are very narrow. Like one lane wide if you're lucky. Now in most countries these would be merely back roads with one house on them, but here they are main thoroughfares to entire towns. The B4221 or B4225 for example. Two main roads to the town of Newent, both of which are a nightmare. You drive along thinking you are at the side of the road, as far over as you can get, when a huge truck full of sheep comes the other way, or a tractor puling an entire farmhouse, and expects you to miraculously half the size of your vehicle so it can get by. And believe me the locals don't crawl along either, as far as they are concerned the speed limit is 60 mph and so that's what they do! There are a lot of cars round here with missing wing mirrors. What baffles me is all the locals seem to bomb round these little lanes with out hitting each other but seem incapable of parking in the supermarket carpark with out hitting the car either side. Maybe they can only steer at full speed?

It's also been a bit tricky getting round because of all the rain, quite a few roads have been flooded shut and so you are forced to follow detour signs to get where you are going. Unfortunately the Gloucestershire county council roads department doesn't seem to have too many of these signs, so you follow the first couple, which send you along narrower and more underused roads, until you are completely lost and the detour signs run out.  Genius. This is why I now have a woman in a box suction cupped to my windscreen telling me where to go.

The last thing is all the roadworks. Not just the ones I've moaned about before.  They are everywhere. In fact everywhere I want to go. Gloucester? Roadworks - A40; Ross? Roadworks - Town Centre; Birmingham? Roadworks - M50; Bristol? Roadworks - M32; Cornwall? Roadworks - M5. The brilliance of all this is that, if you've worked out where I am at the moment, you'll see that EVERY route in and out, to go anywhere has roadworks. I would think that it would be better to finish one lot before you start the next lot so that all the traffic has an alternate route? Is that not bleeding obvious?

I'm off to Prague tomorrow. Wish me luck as the airport is off the M5...near the roadworks. It's ok though as the alternate route is through Bristol...and the roadworks.