A Slice of Life
Bill Lites
Our Trip To The UK Part 1
By Bill Lites
In the first week in October 1991, DiVoran and I boarded a Delta Airlines L-1011 airplane in Orlando, Florida to begin a three week trip-of-a-lifetime to England, Scotland and Wales. The occasion of this special trip was to continue our 34th wedding anniversary celebration, which we had started the month before. We flew from Orlando to Atlanta, and connected with another Delta flight across the “Pond” (Atlantic Ocean) to the London Gatwick airport, just south of London. What a delightful trip that was. We were served a magnificent 3-course Filet Mignon dinner, with our choice of wine, and dessert. After several sleepless hours, we were given hot towels to freshen up with, and then later we were served a wonderful full-course breakfast (Oh, for the good old days). We landed in a typical English fog and mist, which gave us a taste of what we could look forward to in the way of weather, during our upcoming UK travels.
The first big surprise was at the rental car office, where I discovered the car we had rented was “stick shift.” Now, I can handle a normal stick shift transmission here in the U.S. where you drive on the right side of the road, steering with my left hand and shifting with my right hand. But, since we were now in the UK, where they drive on the left side 
of the road, and steer from the right side of the car; that meant I was going to have to drive with my right hand and shift with my left hand, while trying to keep from hitting a pedestrian or running off the road into a ditch. Are you beginning to get the picture? All this, while trying to read the road signs and dealing with the “Round-A-Bout” intersections, that were new to both DiVoran and me. I was going to have to retrain my brain if we were going to live to see the rest of the UK we had come to visit. DiVoran and I agreed that she would remind me to stay on the left side of the road every time I started to stray to the right. Leaving the rental car agency parking area dumped us right into Charlwood city traffic, so it was white knuckle driving from the “get-go” with DiVoran yelling, “KEEP LEFT” – “KEEP LEFT” at every cross-street and round-a-bout.
By some miracle, we made it out of the Charlwood city area. Then as we were heading south toward Brighton Beach, the windshield wipers stopped working. We used one of 
those cool looking red telephone booths to call the rental car agency, who told us we would have to take the car to a Vauxhall dealer in the area to get them fixed. Great! Now we had to locate a Vauxhall dealership in a town we knew nothing about, and pray they wouldn’t give us a hassle reserved for “American Tourists.” As it turned out, we were able to find the Vauxhall dealership without too much trouble, and they fixed the wiper motor, without as much as a, “And where are you from, Yank?”
Since we had arrive at around 8:00 am, and the repairs hadn’t take long, we decided to go ahead and make the short trip to Brighton Beach to check out the Brighton Pavilion & 
Museum there. The Royal Pavilion was built in three stages, beginning in 1787, as a seaside retreat for George, Prince of Wales, and was not finished until 1822, where it was used as a remote location for the discreet liaisons of the then King George IV. The Brighton Museum & Art Gallery contains beautiful displays of Art Nouveau, Art Deco furniture and other decorative art. There are also Sussex area archaeology relics and the history of Brighton. The Booth Museum of Natural History, the Preston Manor and the Grange Rottingdean are short distances away, but we were getting tired and saved them for another day.
—–To Be Continued—–
Old Things R New 