A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If petrol prices keep going the way they’re going, driving holidays could go the way of the dodo – just when the SatNav had taken the stress out of long car journeys to where only God (and Alexa) knows.

Today’s driver knows nothing of the trauma of a giant map being unveiled before your eyes – indeed blocking your eyes and your vision as you career down an unfamiliar motorway just under the speed limit.

And then, when you get lost on secondary roads with a Mohican patch of grass up the middle, you find that, all along, the map was upside down.

Driving in foreign countries raised a couple of specific problems; the biggest one, of course, is that they largely drive on the opposite side of the road – or as the Brits describe it, the wrong side of the road, because they’re always right.

The problem is compounded by the fact that their steering wheels are also on the opposite side of the road, which can leave you automatically search for the gears in the side pocket of your driver’s door.

The alternative is to bring your own car, but that leaves you with the strange sensation of hogging the footpath when you should be close to the central white line.

It also causes a complication at toll booths, where you have to drop the coins in from the passenger side. Which is fine if you have a passenger but can otherwise leave you perilously close to abdominal injury if you forget to take off the seat-belt as you lean out the far window.

And the other issue with driving in distant lands was getting lost and having to ask an unenthusiastic passer-by for directions…in a foreign language.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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