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I am amused by this BBC article on Britain's most intimidating road junctions.. Particularly this comment: Between them, Birmingham, London and Glasgow took eight of the top 10 spots.
Strangely enough, I had no difficulty in guessing what the other two junctions in the list were. Yes, the Swindon and Hemel magic roundabouts, at #4 and #9.
(As someone who negotiated the Hanger Lane gyratory (#5) twice a day for several years, I think I can cope with just about anything, though I'll concede that the Glasgow ones are a real pain.)
Strangely enough, I had no difficulty in guessing what the other two junctions in the list were. Yes, the Swindon and Hemel magic roundabouts, at #4 and #9.
(As someone who negotiated the Hanger Lane gyratory (#5) twice a day for several years, I think I can cope with just about anything, though I'll concede that the Glasgow ones are a real pain.)
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:08 pm (UTC)This is unfortunately the junction most convenient for the car park which is handiest for two of the better gig venues in Glasgow.
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-27 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-27 12:13 pm (UTC)My father, a nervous driver at best, refused point-blank to tackle it and my brother or I always drove if we were going through Swindon.
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:20 pm (UTC)In a straight line.
Right across the middle.
Moral: he who has armour and weaponry, wins.
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:33 pm (UTC)Came off the motorway at the wrong junction and misread the sign in darkness and torrential rain that obscured the road markings; I went across three mini-roundabouts on the wrong side of the road before the oncoming headlights tipped me off about what I was doing wrong ...
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Date: 2009-11-27 01:12 pm (UTC)Happily for me, the first time I met it was on a nice sunny day when visiting
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:12 pm (UTC)'Oh, look', said my mother, whom I was chauffeuring on my first, very nerve-wracking drive into Greater London, 'someone's been playing around with the road signs'.
'That's not a joke, mum ...' says dutiful daughter, concentrating very hard on trying to fight her way through the road junction. 'Please be quiet, I need to get through this in one piece'.
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Date: 2009-11-27 12:25 pm (UTC)For me, it's Piccadilly and Five Ways I've not driven through, though I might have been through the latter.
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Date: 2009-11-27 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-27 06:28 pm (UTC)Nose-to-tail traffic with drivers changing across three to six lanes at average speeds of 70mph, that's what's wrong with it. That, and the layout is so non-standard for British motorways (cloverleafs are vanishingly rare on this side of the Atlantic -- we use roundabouts or gyratories instead) that everybody travelling through it gets confused. Oh, and there's the third motorway feeding in half a mile upstream to add to the amusement. If you're American, layer "Boston-style drivers" on top of that.
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Date: 2009-11-27 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-28 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-28 12:51 am (UTC)It was dark.
It was snowing sufficiently hard that shortly after we entered, they closed it to any more traffic.
And we were in a VW beetle.
(For extra fun, MiL-to-be actually had a prosthetic for one hand, but since she'd been coping with life with only one real hand since a child, that wasn't something we tended to note most of the time. She managed to raise both a set of triplets, and a son who managed to be president of the Oxford Union before reaching his current position with BBC Newsnight, so a pretty capable woman.)
If it hadn't been dark, I might have actually seen how scary that trip was, but at the time, we were so relieved at getting away from Derby, anything looked good.
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Date: 2009-11-28 12:54 am (UTC)Not keen to repeat that..
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Date: 2009-11-28 12:23 am (UTC)