June 5, 2017

After an uneventful 4 hour ferry crossing we arrived in Great Britain on Monday at 3:30 pm Greenwich time. Now we are only 8 hours ahead of the Pacific time zone in which we live, rather than 9 hours.
We are driving on the wrong side of the road.
It is amazing what creatures of habit mankind is. The British follow the historic method of traveling along the left side of roads that goes back to the Romans. Since most people are right handed, soldiers – and later wagon drivers – kept to the left, leaving the sword arm – and later the whip arm – free for use.
Much later, in France, wide and heavy wagons with no driver seats, pulled by teams of horses or oxen, became a common mode of transportation. The driver sat on the back of the rear left horse/oxen, whip in hand, and directing the team from the right side of the road became more convenient. Napoleon decreed right handed driving to be the law, which spread throughout his conquered lands. America followed suite with their large and heavy wagons, and so the right hand driving experience became engrained into our psyche. Now, Bruce and I will be driving against every instinct.
Fortunately we only had to drive 12 miles following other cars which helped us stay on the correct side of the road. Still, it was a tense 12 miles since we were not driving in our natural state.
I had forgotten to write down the address of the Brighton Caravan Club Site while I still had wifi so we were unable to use T/T/T for directions. We drove by the seat of our pants using memory and maps and arrived with minimal shouting at each other. It’s a sad state of affairs to admit how dependent we have become on GPS mapping applications.

June 8, 2017 – Still in Brighton

Poor Bruce and his back. He has been dealing with pain for the whole time we have been in Europe – some days he is in less pain and some days more but he hasn’t had a pain free day since we arrived.
We arrived in Brighton on Monday and had hoped to get a Chiropractor appointment on Tuesday. The Caravan Club had space for us until Friday which would give us 2-3 days for Bruce to indulge in some R&R. As it turned out we couldn’t get an appointment until Thursday which was a bit of a problem if we had to leave Friday. Fortunately spaces opened up and we wrangled another couple of days out of them. An Itasca Suncruiser was parked right across from us -it  looked so much like our Queenie at home, we had to go introduce ourselves:

The doctor did his thing on B’s back, and while it is sore – often the aftermath of a wrestling match with a chiropractor – we are hoping it will have done him some good. He was given a regimen of stretching exercises that I intend to nag him into doing daily.
The result of this back issue is a major slowdown in our sightseeing capabilities. He can’t walk for any distance or handle the jarring of bike riding so we are limited to only a couple of hours each day. We both want this resolved so we can get on with our travels.
We have taken the bus into Brighton twice now but on both trips we were on missions. The first was to get SIM cards for our iPhones and iPad, and the second day was the Chiropractor. We may not be getting to walk the town much but the bus does a good job of giving us an overview of the city.
It is one busy place. It seems like Brighton is much bigger than we imagined with a large downtown area filled with a lot of people taking advantage of a lot shopping opportunities. We walked through The Lanes – a historic area known for its twisty alleyways and filled with pricy antique and specialty shops. We ate fish and chips at a little restaurant on the seashore promenade and took picture board pictures of ourselves on the Brighton Pier (one of our very favorite pastimes.)

We got on and off the buses at the Royal Pavilion – a fairytale palace right out of “1001 Arabian Nights” built for King George IV, the son of Mad King George III, who lost the colonies in the American Revolution (and is portrayed wonderfully in the musical Hamilton).

We will give ourselves a day of rest and do some much needed laundry and hopefully return to town one more time before we leave on Sunday.
Next stop: Winchester Cathedral.