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So a large part of yesterday, well sort of the beginning and the end was spent in Bristol meeting up with assorted cosplay peoples. It was nice to get talk and get to know a few of them better, oh and make a sort of iterative Fallout 3 cosplay plans with Jack. Hopefully having someone else interested will spur me onto making an overall better costume, and possibly at this rate more props than I could carry. Should be fun though.
Now trying to make my way to the right part of Bristol and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sephnoir house. I had a postcode which I typed into google maps and left at about 8:50 eventually arriving at 10:45...
I think I spent about 1hr 20 being various stages of lost, driving around Bristol trying to find out where the hell I was so I could work our roughly where I needed to go.
For those who don't know Bristol there are four things that make driving around it particularly unpleasant:
1)Lack of road signs.
If you're lucky you'll get a sign telling you which major A road you're about to join, though chances of you seeing any signs once on that road telling you're still on it are slim to none, especially when you come to a junction, and you will come to a junction. At one point trying to join the A37, I variously approached a junction from all four directions, only one of those four actually listed that the road was the A37. A big reason I was so lost is the one street I was looking for, one of about 20 roads off a main road, didn't have a road name sign. That main road I was on was signed from both sides, but at least one of those was ambiguously placed between two exits on a roundabout so you can't tell which one it applied to.
2)Sudden and highly restrictive lanes and one way systems.
It's entirely possible to pick the wrong lane when approaching a roundabout at Bristol, say for example one of three for going straight ahead, only to find yourself trapped going completely the wrong way three junctions later because there's no information which lane goes where. Obviously this matters less at night when you can swap, but if your in traffic you're not getting out of you're lane short of deliberately causing an accident to make space. What's worse is that you can be travelling normally along a section of two way road only for the other side to suddenly turn off and you find yourself presented with a sudden stretch of one way systems which always invariably appears to curve away from whatever direction you wanted to head.
At one point I ended up travelling back and forth along the road looking for my unsigned destination only to travel too far in one direction and ended up on a stretch of one way road and have to drive practically to the ring road and back to turn around. And then coming back the other way I couldn't even turn back onto the road I'd left (instead I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and retreated back to another section of Bristol I knew better to attempt to approach it afresh again).
3)All the suburbs look identical once you're in them.
Should you find yourself lost away from a main road, and even occasionally when travelling on the main road, in the middle of a suburb you'll quickly learn than every street looks the same as every other street. You're only hope it to keep going forward in hope you'll escape into some random part of Bristol, or turn around and find you're way back. Well unless of course the roads suddenly start to become one way only.
4)Bristol drivers.
So if you don't know where you're going, you will get lost and you will want to change lanes a lot. Not that drivers in Bristol will let you. If you want to switch lane they will not let you out. If you want to go slowly to try and spot a road sign, they'll crawl up your bumper. Every single time I tried to spot the unsigned destination road going up and down the main road, I had a car crawling up my bumper.
Now I don't know if anyone else finds this, but aren't google maps directions completely useless. There fine when you're going for major routes, but as soon as you get to the important fiddly final section they seem to throw all sense out the window. I've not used them yet without their either wanting to send you through a series of random small roads (that inevitably have more one way restrictions than google shows) or to find that while following the routes over roundabouts it describes that you invariably end up with the road signage telling you a completely different thing to the directions or more typically with two more roundabout in real life than google believes exists...
The worst part of last night was that I actually parked on the right road to call for directions, only to have anyone I could have talked to be otherwise engaged that moment, leaving me little choice except to keep trying to find my way myself (before getting caught in the aforementioned one way to ring road section).
On the plus side all that getting lost and 40-50 miles of travelling around Bristol was an excellent test of my new car. I had all kinds of speed limits, lane changes, junctions, roundabouts, multiple u-turns and some speed bumps to deal with, and driving my car is just really pleasant and enjoyable. It can made getting repeatedly lost and forced in random directions tolerable.
Now trying to make my way to the right part of Bristol and
sephnoir house. I had a postcode which I typed into google maps and left at about 8:50 eventually arriving at 10:45...I think I spent about 1hr 20 being various stages of lost, driving around Bristol trying to find out where the hell I was so I could work our roughly where I needed to go.
For those who don't know Bristol there are four things that make driving around it particularly unpleasant:
1)Lack of road signs.
If you're lucky you'll get a sign telling you which major A road you're about to join, though chances of you seeing any signs once on that road telling you're still on it are slim to none, especially when you come to a junction, and you will come to a junction. At one point trying to join the A37, I variously approached a junction from all four directions, only one of those four actually listed that the road was the A37. A big reason I was so lost is the one street I was looking for, one of about 20 roads off a main road, didn't have a road name sign. That main road I was on was signed from both sides, but at least one of those was ambiguously placed between two exits on a roundabout so you can't tell which one it applied to.
2)Sudden and highly restrictive lanes and one way systems.
It's entirely possible to pick the wrong lane when approaching a roundabout at Bristol, say for example one of three for going straight ahead, only to find yourself trapped going completely the wrong way three junctions later because there's no information which lane goes where. Obviously this matters less at night when you can swap, but if your in traffic you're not getting out of you're lane short of deliberately causing an accident to make space. What's worse is that you can be travelling normally along a section of two way road only for the other side to suddenly turn off and you find yourself presented with a sudden stretch of one way systems which always invariably appears to curve away from whatever direction you wanted to head.
At one point I ended up travelling back and forth along the road looking for my unsigned destination only to travel too far in one direction and ended up on a stretch of one way road and have to drive practically to the ring road and back to turn around. And then coming back the other way I couldn't even turn back onto the road I'd left (instead I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and retreated back to another section of Bristol I knew better to attempt to approach it afresh again).
3)All the suburbs look identical once you're in them.
Should you find yourself lost away from a main road, and even occasionally when travelling on the main road, in the middle of a suburb you'll quickly learn than every street looks the same as every other street. You're only hope it to keep going forward in hope you'll escape into some random part of Bristol, or turn around and find you're way back. Well unless of course the roads suddenly start to become one way only.
4)Bristol drivers.
So if you don't know where you're going, you will get lost and you will want to change lanes a lot. Not that drivers in Bristol will let you. If you want to switch lane they will not let you out. If you want to go slowly to try and spot a road sign, they'll crawl up your bumper. Every single time I tried to spot the unsigned destination road going up and down the main road, I had a car crawling up my bumper.
Now I don't know if anyone else finds this, but aren't google maps directions completely useless. There fine when you're going for major routes, but as soon as you get to the important fiddly final section they seem to throw all sense out the window. I've not used them yet without their either wanting to send you through a series of random small roads (that inevitably have more one way restrictions than google shows) or to find that while following the routes over roundabouts it describes that you invariably end up with the road signage telling you a completely different thing to the directions or more typically with two more roundabout in real life than google believes exists...
The worst part of last night was that I actually parked on the right road to call for directions, only to have anyone I could have talked to be otherwise engaged that moment, leaving me little choice except to keep trying to find my way myself (before getting caught in the aforementioned one way to ring road section).
On the plus side all that getting lost and 40-50 miles of travelling around Bristol was an excellent test of my new car. I had all kinds of speed limits, lane changes, junctions, roundabouts, multiple u-turns and some speed bumps to deal with, and driving my car is just really pleasant and enjoyable. It can made getting repeatedly lost and forced in random directions tolerable.
