Getting Lost in England

Roundabouts are tricky, unforgiving things, tossed like so many circus hoops across England’s landscape by some daft, peevish traffic planner. You have the choice of either choosing, on half a second’s notice, what you pray will be the correct ray (out of three or four) of road jutting out from the circle, and risking finding yourself heading down miles of minimally marked, spotlessly clean road in the wrong direction, or simply driving around and around the thing, if only to calm your rattled, right-side-of-the-road-oriented nerves. All of the roundabouts can be classified as either intermediate or advanced, the latter being the dreaded double roundabout. There are no roundabouts for beginners.

We were absolute beginners, absolutely. We had, however, had the good sense to turn even more of our near-worthless American dollars over to the car hire (note how handily I toss about the English terms after only 6 nights in England) company at Heathrow in exchange for the luxuries of air conditioning and an automatic transmission in our little space capsule of a car. My husband, Lorenzo, by virtue of being the one who had bothered to renew his driver’s license, was the designated driver. My task was to scream, “Look to your right!” every few miles.

We’d come to England courtesy of American Airlines, from whom I’d won two round-trip tickets to any of their destinations the previous summer. (With only three weeks left before they expired, I decided where we’d travel with them using a method only slightly more sophisticated than closing my eyes and stabbing my finger at a random place on a map. I chose London because (1) neither my husband, my son, nor I had ever been there, (2) there is a Legoland in nearby Windsor, ensuring that my son’s first trip to Europe would, failing all else, be a glorious memory in at least one way, and (3) well, I’m not sure that there was a third reason.)

After two unspeakably expensive nights in London, and another two truly pleasant ones at the Hilton St. Anne’s Manor (a Hilton equivalent of Brideshead, complete with horses, deer, rabbits, and rolling lawns set up for croquet) near Legoland, we decided to get in our space capsule and hit the roads in earnest. The porter at the Hilton St. Anne’s–an sweet, elderly man straight out of a film adaptation of a Dickens book–considered our vague, Quadrophenia-influenced plan to head for Brighton, and gently suggested that we reconsider and go to Bournemouth, another seaside town to the west of Brighton. “Not so crowded there,” he advised, and traced his finger along a route by which we could stop and see Stonehenge on the way. It all looked so simple–get back on jolly old M3 (along which we’d managed to travel more-or-less without incident from Heathrow to the hotel two days earlier), which would eventually become A303, and then turn off to A344 to get to Stonehenge. From there it would be M3 pretty much all of the way to Bournemouth. I got online and made a haphazard reservation at a hotel in Bournemouth, and printed out directions from Expedia, just to be certain (one thing that my husband does not have is a sense of direction, and I fully intended to be nearly speechless with fear of an accident as we drove, and therefore unable to help much).

There is something exhilarating about traveling to a place you’ve never been before, and–at least for part of your stay–having little or no idea where you’ll end up. Frankly, I thought that it was very cool of us to simply head off in our space capsule into the not-all-that-vast English unknown, especially with a 7-year-old in the backseat, waxing nostalgic already about his day at Legoland Windsor. We were American pioneers in England, intrepid and not restricted by the chains of conventional tourism.

We got lost immediately. I believe that it was one of the advanced-level double roundabouts that catapulted us off course the first time (there were to be many more). It may even have been an intermediate-level single roundabout. In any case, there we were on the minimally marked, spotlessly clean road that ran for miles through a beautiful, bucolic nowhere. It was now past lunchtime and, in my family, things get ugly fast if the men don’t eat on time. Back home, of course, there would have been exits every few miles, and we could have taken our pick of the culinary offerings of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, the occasional Outback or Hooter’s. Here there was one small sign, which may even have been hand-painted, for something called The Swan. With no alternatives in sight, we turned our space capsule in the direction of The Swan.

Naturally, this turned out to be one of those serendipitous occurrences that intrepid travelers like us are always hoping to stumble onto–a reward for carelessness, a glimpse into a place not mentioned on the Expedia map. We found ourselves in the preposterously picturesque, tiny town of East Ilsley, which, aside from a few cars, looked pretty much exactly as it must have in the Middle Ages, when it was the site of a corn market, a see-and-be-seen sheep fair, and a number of taverns catering to the corn-sellers and sheep-exhibitors (this all according to an informational postcard we picked up at The Swan).

The Swan itself was at least 400 years old, but the food was fresh. We ordered Ploughman’s lunches and a couple of pints, and gloated. A small, slightly bent man brought us our plates; it turned out that his name was Willy, and that he’d been a jockey for 26 years, and that he’d lived in Atlanta for a while. Having been obsessed with horses and horse-racing as a child, I was thrilled to speak to an actual jockey; I gathered that Willy was equally happy to have someone to talk to about his career.

“Have you ever been thrown during a race?” I asked him.

Proudly, he held up one four-fingered hand. Enough said, especially as he had just told us that racehorses can run at speeds up to about 45 miles an hour.

Assuring Willy that we’d take him up on his offer to take us to the races at Ascot if we were ever in village again (and we fully intend to be), we reluctantly left The Swan, strapped ourselves in to the space capsule, took off, and cheerfully waited to get lost again.

Coming to England, we each had goals for the trip. My husband wanted to see the insides of a few quaint, musty old pubs (done, although further research was not out of the question ). My son’s first priority was Legoland; he also thought that the Tower of London should provide some good, clean, torture- and beheading-related fun (done, but the latter ended up just kind of freaking him out). I’d gotten it into my head that we needed to see Stonehenge.

Stonehenge, I now know, does not exist. It’s a pretty lie dreamed up by some daft, peevish British tourism person to lure unsuspecting Americans far out beyond their depth in the English countryside in retaliation for some long-ago slight. Print out your own Expedia driving directions and find out for yourself. Go on–take M3 to A303 and simply keep right onto A344. If you find it, let me know. (In the States, of course, there would have been billboards every few hundred feet proclaiming the glories of the given attraction, and its exact whereabouts, as well as clusters of motels, souvenir shops, and fast-food restaurants gleaming with the brightness of the Star of Bethlehem for those who had made the pilgrimage. In England, tourism is a much more intuitive activity. Which is good. Except that we were not blessed with that kind of intuition.)

Having learned that the Mystery of Stonehenge is actually simply a matter of where in hell A344 is, and having passed the same sign for a crematorium in Basingstoke several times, we eventually gave up that particular quest and headed for Bournemouth.

The good citizens of Windsor and its neighboring towns are proud–and rightfully so–of the preponderance of roundabouts in the area. Clearly, however, the ones who do the (understated) bragging had never been to Bournemouth, where, in lieu of the daft and peevish traffic planner who had tossed roundabouts around the rest of the country, someone had hired an independent contractor, a roundabout artist, a mad genius with a vision to rival Da Vinci’s. Although we’d managed to get from “Stonehenge” to the outskirts of Bournemouth without incident, our space capsule was thrown into one dizzying orbit after another once we got into town. Undeterred, and finally humble enough to ask someone for directions (although his answer was unintelligible except for the word “fliver”–we think–he motioned in the right direction), we found our hotel, but in nowhere near the time indicated by our Expedia directions.

“Bob’s your uncle!” said my husband, several times, giddy from the circles. He now firmly believed that there was a conspiracy, put into practice in Bournemouth by the man who had give us directions, to confuse off-course Americans by speaking a made-up language that sounded like British English, but was in fact nonsense.

And yet, in spite of having driven in circles, and up and down the same pristine, Stonehenge-free roads, all day, it was all OK.

By Nancy Bevilaqua (c) 2008