I have to admit to being an Anglo-phile having owned British sports cars for most of the years I’ve had a driver’s license. My first time in the country was when sweetie Carolyn went there for a study-abroad program around the time that the movie Notting Hill came out. That was almost a decade ago, and I think I am almost due for another visit of the Mother Country.
“Hey, what is that?” asked my friend Lisa during her visit as we drove over to Old Town. “Looks like Stonehenge!”
The original Stonehenge, of course, is a rock outcropping near Salisbury, England. There also is at least one reproduction of it in the world, in MaryHill, Washington. But one in Fort Collins? Continue reading »
As I was driving back to London and was in the proximity of Stonehenge, I saw a sign that said “Haynes Motor Museum”. Intrigued, I stopped on by. It turned out this was a museum of the namesake of all of my workshop manuals, and had an entire room of British Sports Cars! This was definitely one of the best museums I have ever been to and emphatically recommend it to any British sports car lover.
In August of 2000 I rented a little Vauxhall Corsa and did a driving tour of the southern expanse of England. In addition to visiting Carolyn, I drove to Oxford, Dover, Stonehenge, Sommerset, Exmoor, and the Lynmouth Coast. It took me about a day to get used to driving on the left; e.g., the first day I smacked a curb as I wasn’t used to the expanse of “car” to the left of me, and a few hours later made a right turn into the wrong lane. From that point on I kept having to tell myself, “remember, WIDE right turn”. Continue reading »
Sweetie Carolyn went off to study for a semester at the University of London, so I flew out to be with her and experience England for the first time. It is particularly notable that this trip would begin a foreign-country-a-year streak that I hope to maintain for many more decades.
