europe: driving to oxford

Friday, August 6, 1999

We’ve been in Oxford for the past 2 days now. Oxford is mostly—actually completely—a college town, centered around its many colleges, which are collectively known as Oxford University.

More about the university in a bit, but first I have to describe how we got here. On Thursday morning we checked out of our B&B at 10am and took the tube to the airport, which is about a 45 minute ride. It was rather uneventful, and the crowds heading in that direction were not too bad, which was surprising. After getting to the airport, we went to terminal 1 and went to Eurotravel (or something like that). After all the hidden charges, the rental is costing us about $25/day each. After the bus took us to the lot, we picked up our car. It’s a Rover, a medium sized 2-door sedan. Rather nice, except for the steering wheel being on the wrong side. Rosie drove the car from the airport—it was quite frightening, and only got worse later on.

The trip to Oxford is about an hour by car. In about 40 or so minutes we got to the outskirts of Oxford. We drove around aimlessly and lost for about 15 minutes, and eventually stopped in a gas station to buy a map. Rosie was definitely not comfortable driving on the wrong side and barely missed clipped parked cars on the left—barely, that is, until she successfully....

 Oxford, UK | ,