Ah, the Swindon Magic Roundabout! I lived in Swindon for a few years, when I worked at Intel. Whenever a colleague visited from our sister site in Oregon, we would usually tell our visitor about the Magic Roundabout. Given that they were already disomfitted by driving on the wrong side of the road, and weren't used to roundabouts (I gather there are far fewer roundabouts in the USA than in Britain), the idea of five roundabouts in one usually freaked them out. "No," we would say, "it's really quite simple." We'd draw diagrams on a whiteboard, showing the layout and the traffic flow, and then send our hapless visitor off in his hire car to try it out. One chap didn't come back for over 2 hours - we were getting quite worried about him and nearly sent out search parties to look for him!
Once you know what you're doing, the Magic Roundabout is brilliant. My route to work used to take me into the Magic Roundabout where I had to turn left. Everyone else also wanted to turn left, so there were always long queues in the 2 left-hand lanes of the approach road. Eventually I twigged that all I had to do was zip down the right-hand lane, turn right at the first roundabout, go round a couple of others, then come back to the first roundabout, this time with priority over the poor devils still queing to get onto it, and off I went! I once got lost trying to get to Buckinghamshire (took the wrong turning off the M25, and couldn't get back onto it.) I couldn't work out where on earth I was, until I saw a horribly familiar sight looming up ahead of me in the dark - a Magic Roundabout! I knew I must be in Hemel Hempstead, and found my way from there. (In those days there were only two Magic Roundabouts - how many are there now?) Regards, Annette in London (I escaped from Swindon!) To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
