There’s a reason you don’t often hear about American tourists renting cars and driving the entire length and breadth of the main British Island…lots of reasons. But that’s precisely what we were planning to do.

I had always assumed that the hardest part about learning to drive in the UK would be remembering to stay on the left side of the road. Not so much...I was surprised how quickly that became second nature. It was probably the easiest part about learning to navigate the British Road System. There were a host of other, more difficult things to master.

For instance, there’s the peculiar fact that English roads are positively lillipution compared to their American counterparts. Every oncoming car feels like a head-on collision, and trynig to scoot by an on-rushing laurie (semi-truck) is very much a religious experience (my confessions were fast and silent). Cars and trucks are forced to pass each other at breakneck speeds, separated by mere inches. There’s zero margin for error.

Roads that would be 45 MPH in the states are 60 MPH in the UK. Their “A” roads resemble narrow, undivided rural routes, but they treat them like friggin’ interstates. I’m a fast driver by American standards (I’ve got the points on my license to prove it) but I never felt truly comfortable driving the speed limit there.

Then there’s those infernal roundabouts! And we’re not talking about the little ones you see in America. These things have two, three, even four lanes, and they’re not afraid to stack them one after another so that you have to negotiate the entire series of them to get anyplace. It’s absolute madness! Driving quickly became a chore, and we looked for opportunities to ditch the car.

It was all made OK by the fact that we were there, motoring through one of the most beautifully pastoral landscapes in the world, though. The very place that my ancestors had called home for a thousand generations. It was somewhere between Midsomer Norton and Shepton Mallet that I realized this wasn’t just a vacation for me. It was a homecoming of sorts. A pilgrimage.

We drove through sparkling little towns and villages with names like Little Keyford and Maiden Bradley, to a British National Trust sight called Stourhead.


Stourhouse

Shauna had spent a day there during her semester abroad and it was at the top of her list of places she wanted to see again, And for good reason. Stourhead is widely thought to be the most beautiful landscape garden in all of England. It sprawls over an early 18th century estate originally owned by the Hoare family, founders of the Hoare Company (the only privately held bank in Britain). It’s a tree lover’s paradise, home to an unsurpassed collection of domestic and exotic lumber. There were Redwoods, Sequoias, Sitka Spruces and Western Red Cedars right next to Common Oaks and English Maples.




The whole place is littered with ancient looking structures. There’s a medieval church, a Palladian House, and a pair of Greco-Roman Temples rumored to have been used for wild, week long royal orgies. Alright, I made that last bit up…but they could have been used for something like that!


The lake at Stourhead



We walked around the grounds for a couple hours, snapping photos and generally taking it all in. It was every bit as amazing as Shauna had boasted. To my knowledge, no garden in the states even comes close. But, in the end I was just putting off the inevitable. We couldn’t stay there forever…I’d have to eventually cowboy up and learn to drive like a Brit!