Had dinner with my son and his wife today, who just got back from 10 days in the UK; she was sightseeing and he was consulting for Rolls-Royce in Derby.

Their first visit.

1) He landed in Manchester and rented a car like he would do here, but says he wouldn't bother next time; the trains and busses go everywhere. A shuttle went straight from his hotel to the factory.

She was able to get busses to everywhere she wanted to go, shopping and sightseeing, while he was working.

2) Same observation as I've always had there - British drivers are far more skillful handling their cars and far more aware of others than American drivers are. American drivers combine a lack of skills with competitive arrogance to make things much slower moving here. He couldn't figure out the speed patterns of the Brit drivers until he realized that they were managing the speed cameras to avoid getting nicked for average speed between cameras. That's not a thing here.

3) With no filtering here, a motorcycle in the city is a liability. He was amazed at the way bikers navigated through traffic. Never seen that before.

4) He's in a high-tech engineering field, and he was impressed with the skills and perspecuity of his RR counterparts as they shared information. The light bulb came on when he realized he was standing where The Industrial Revolution began.

5) He's a US Marine combat infantry veteran, and his business host was a Royal Marine combat infantry veteran. They got along famously, as you might imagine.

6) He and his wife took a day to take the train early in the morning to St Pancras station in London, and they spent the day until late at night seeing the sights. He noted that London looked pretty "international" but was still very much what he expected it to look like; perhaps there were a lot of people of all ages wandering about that looked like they had nothing to do, but that's true of most big cities these days.

However, as dark fell, he noted that he and his wife were the only white people left on the streets. No "clubbers" cruising from joint to joint as I remember from my times there. He didn't see anything to worry him though. They got back to Derby about midnight.

Food and accommodations were all very nice and he's looking forward to going back ....

Lannis