Yes folks. Speed.

We hired our first car last weekend for a 580 mile round journey between here and Penzance and back again. I made the assumption (which I’ve now been corrected on, mind you), that Englands Highway’s worked a little bit like the Autobahns in Germany and across Europe, in that they had no actual posted speed limit. So I followed the people in the fast lane. 110mph in a Vauxhall Corsa (Holden Barina) felt a little unsavoury at some stages, especially in the dark and the wet, but it seemed to hold it fine, and we made up some awesome time.

Alas, this sign means the same thing as it does in Australia (although I’ve only seen it on WA roads once or twice), it means open road, stick to the County/Country Speed limit or something like that. Which is 80mph (~120km/hr)! I found this out today, indeed open road is very different in meaning to open limit. Ah well, no fines or anything yet.. I hope.

We did see lots of road signs like this though:

A roundabout

Which is all well and good, but when there’s 8 plus exits of the one roundabout and some don’t seem to have exits I imagine it would make it hard to work out exactly which one you need to get off at, “lets see, I just passed the 3rd unsigned exit, or was that the fourth? ”

Oh, and speed is obviously a problem in Cornwall as well, I’m guessing by this sign i found at the back of a pub called the Crown:

Drugs, careful kids.

Yet another example of a sign in the ‘K, that seems to be blindingly obvious.  Has the world gone mad? Or is there another pub around the corner that this behaviour is actually condoned in?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 12:26 am and is filed under UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.