This is why I hate Summer (this photo was taken just before the "holiday season"). The roads round here were not built for our annual tsunami of tourists in SUVs, dragging caravans at walking pace and getting lost or stuck or both (usually when I'm in a hurry to get somewhere). And yet they descend on us every year and turn our local lanes into car parks. There are many weekends when I cannot even get out of the village as the coast road becomes a solid, seething mass of stationary tourist traffic. Go visit somewhere sunny, you bastards! Stay away from Norfolk. You are not welcome here (except Blogville folk, of course, who count as honorary locals).
This wide open highway is the road north out of my village. It narrows down considerably when it gets near Ranworth, which is why I only go there out of season.
17 comments:
And I thought WE had traffic-inciting roads!
The coming of Sat-Nav has made things even worse, Katherine. We now get huge articulated lorries guided down tiny lanes where they get stuck and cannot get out again.
This is quite a wide road compared to many around here. A lot have grass growing up the middle of them.
What's Sat-Nav?
Satellite navigation, Katerine. Or GPS, global positioning system, as we seem to refer to it here, sugar! Think Garmin. xoxox
Dive, I feel your pain re tourists! xoxoxoo
Katherine, Savannah's right. Sat-Nav is all very well in a plce like the US where you have long, straight roads. Where you have hundreds of tiny little lanes, mostly leading nowhere, it merely makes dumb and arrogant drivers dumber and more arrogant.
And lost.
Savannah, the perils of living somewhere beautiful. If ever I manage to come to Savannah I shall do it out of season. xoxoxoxo
Ahhh GPS. Often a live map will pinpoint me a whole street away, parallel to where I really am.
Though I do love to make it recalculate the route by turning off when it doesn't tell me to, hehe.
I totally understand! I do not visit my home town on Holiday weekends or summer weekends because the traffic is ridiculous. I prefer to visit in the off-season when I can appreciate the ocean and the salt marsh for all of its natural beauty.
Tsunamis of tourists are overwhelming; one reason we don't go to popular places during holidays. GPS systems have proven to be deadly for some tourists traveling in western US. They end up on logging roads in the mountains, get stuck in mud or snow, and are unable to call for help because they are out of cell phone range. Earlier this spring, a couple were stranded in the mountains around the ID-NV border. The wife was found weeks later, barely alive, by hunters. Her husband, who had tried to go for help, has not been found.
Hee hee, Vic. I refuse to have one of those in my car. Sat-Nav is another thing like mobile phones and McDonalds that will never be part of my life.
Neetzy, you're right. How people can derive any pleasure from sitting in traffic jams is quite beyond me.
Plus of course, coastal towns are always much nicer out of season.
Ms.M, avoiding "popular places" is a sensible decision. They're only beautiful if they're not filled with traffic jams and crowds.
I remember seeing that poor woman on the news (it even got over here). GPS is no substitute for a good map and some common sense.
EEEK to the GPS stories. I have never been that adventurous as my imagination is way too big and I can picture all possible gruesome ends to me.
I do like this pic as it really looks like I imagine England roads to look from movies of course. ;)
I also like how you saved your curmudgeonly ways for everyone EXCEPT us here in Blogville. xx
Shan, your imagination is one of the wonders of Blogville; without it we would all be poorer and would probably giggle a whole lot less.
Yes, an awful lot of the roads around here look like this (or narrower). They are very picturesque but you're pretty much guaranteed to meet something coming the other way, which involves a complex series of hand signals and bowing of heads (we're painfully polite) and one party backing up toward the nearest field entrance so the other party can pass, followed by lots of nodding, smiling and waving.
That's in the winter with the locals; in Summer it is road rage hell with the tourists who do not understand the Jedi ways of country folk.
Politeness is my preference. You see why I'm such an anglophile.
I'll come when summer's over, and I'll hire a guide. I won't drive, myself, on the wrong side of road. I am too polite to pose such a hazard for the locals.
I sympathize about tourists. Pasadena is a minor tourist destination most of the time so it's no big deal, but from mid-December to about January 5th we're inundated for the Rose Bowl and Tournament of Roses Parade. That's only about three weeks. Three months of that would be enough to make me move to another city.
You'd definitely fit in over here, Petrea. With your acting skills you could probably do a pretty convincing Helena Bonham Carter accent to boot.
Pasadena is lucky that the tourists leave it alone most of the year. Those three weeks must be so crazy and annoying. There are so many things in and around Pasadena I want to see (not just the gelateria from yesterday's post), but it's not so much touristy stuff as historic places and buildings (including weird things like the places where Buffy was filmed).
Oh, and the roads are so narrow here, there is no wrong side.
True. There is, however, the wrong side of the car.
They filmed Buffy in Pasadena?
Hee hee. There is definitely the wrong side of some cars around here.
A lot of the buildings and general scenes in Buffy have turned up on your blog. Xander's apartment (I can't remember where that is), Glory's place (Castle Green Apartments), the Church of the Angels and several other familiar places. The rest was filmed in LA (Frank Lloyd Wright's tragically neglected Ennis House was Angel's crash pad) and Torrance.
I can't believe what a geek I am.
Dive, you need this:
http://www.iamnotastalker.com/
If you say hello to Lindsay, tell her I said hi.
Oh, Lordy! I've bookmarked her blog as it's the only celebrity site I've ever seen where I've actually heard of some of the people featured. Three hits on one page: Mad Men, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Yay! I have no idea who any of the other people are, though. What I really need is to spend twenty years or so catching up on US TV shows I've missed.
My entire US TV knowledge consists of M.A.S.H. Buffy, Frasier and The Simpsons (wonderful), Mad Men and Twin Peaks (stylish), and … er … Mythbusters and American Chopper (trash fun). That's it. I'm pretty much a celeb-free zone.
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