Since the day i came to UK, i have missed driving big time. Every time i see a car or bike ripping across (im seated near the window and get to see some cool ones), i felt real bad. Being used to drive atleast 300-400kms a week, not having a vehicle was horrible. Then came the weekend when it actually happened...
After a boring weeks wrk :D we were all set to laze around on the weekend. Thanks to friend who had a leave on this weekend, we had to do some travel thingy. We started to think of possible destinations and after me striking out all other possibilities, we were left with one option- Lake District. Situated at the northern part od England, it is supposed to be very beautiful and calm. Our normal plan was to reach there by bus, roam around and return back. All of a sudden i started to call up car hire agencies to find out the costing. I donno for what reason as it was just out of the fly, i wanted to drive down. The costing was decent and we got a booking done for a ford fiesta.
I had not drove a car outside India and was not used to any kinda lane driving (you knw how we drive back there). I have always been on the middle of the road, the actual speed zone, no way used to exits and stuff and getting used to this lane system gave me scares. We went to the airport to pick up the car(we got a free upgrade for a ford focus-thats what they call when the run out of the actual car :D) and the drive back to the hotel was not so pleasent with a few car ripping passed me real close due to my lack of road sence in this part of the world. This was a real bad drive for my standards (im a decent enough driver back there in blore) and i had real night mares of me crashing on a speedway the whole night. I hardly slept the whole night.
Hoping for the best i got up real early(actually i couldnt sleep) adn we were all set by 8 to hit the road. Thanks to the great UK weather, we couldnt see anyting outside due to fog. The visibility was for 10 feet or so and it was real cold. I had no clue how i can drive with this visibility, but somehow managed to reach the speedway with very few hickup (channging lanes, missing turns and stuff). The highway was quite free as it was a sunday morning and i started to like the feel of the steering in my hand. Soon the fog cleared and a bright sunny day was in front of us (UK weather u see). I started to push the pedal and i hit a decent 130 on the speedometer. It felt quite fast on the speedway as i ripped past some of the famous cars like merc kompressor, range rover, audi a4 and stuff. After about 30mins, arun pointed me out tht the speed i was chking wasnt kmph but mph, which ment that i was doing a whooping 130mph which is close to 220km/hr. Wow, that felt real good and so far we were not chased by police. Soon i realised that there was a speed limit by seeing the super cars not crossing to 100mph speed and had to follow them.
The drive in lake district was out of this world and i enjoyed it more than any ride in my life(I have been on quite a lot of them but this was way better). Clear roads, awesome lakes, beautiful mountains. It was just a perfect way to start driving in some unknown land. I covered almost 100 miles in less than a hour and a half(coz of the speed limit of 40mph in the last 30 odd miles). The entire drive was awesome with picture perfect scenes all around. The first time in my life, i was caught in a traffic jam and felt happy about it. This jam was because of some accident on the road (i was not happy that the accident happened or may be i was -saddist me :P) and we were stuck in one of the most beautiful valley. Next to the road was a huge lake with mountains all around. The place itself was so very beautiful that the entire chaos in traffic dint bother me.
After that we headed back to our hotel and by this time i was a guru of driving in UK. It was a cake walk from there and loved every bit of driving. We almost covered 300miles in 8-9 hours and i dint feel one bit tired and wanted to drive more. At one point i wanted to goto liverpool also but due the the fact that sun set at 4pm in this season, they convinced me to drop it :D
Im waiting again for the weekend where i wanna drive again, This time in a different country known as Scotland :D
You can check some pics of lake district here
http://picasaweb.google.com/ravi.maney/LakeDistrict
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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