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If you're planning to visit Britain, and travel around under your own steam, then - having spent a month driving up through England and Scotland during their latest winter - I've got bad news and good news to offer.
The bad news is that the traffic congestion around
major cities and along much of the south coast is shocking - and I offer that verdict as someone who lives in Auckland.
To add to that, the signposting is idiosyncratic, most secondary roads are so narrow it's impossible to pull off and check directions or admire the view, British traffic planners are addicted to roundabouts regardless of whether they can cope with the load, and it's a nightmare trying to work out in advance which lane you're supposed to be in.
But the good news is that the signs are in English, they drive on the same side of the road - though they do tend to put the wiper and indicator controls the other way around from what we're used to, so you tend to signal a turn by smearing the windscreen - and the motorway junctions often have slip lanes, so if you get a turn-off wrong it's easy to get back on track.
And, best of all, the British are much, much, much more courteous drivers than New Zealanders. True, that's not hard to achieve, because we'd be up near the top of any international league table for the most aggressive, impatient, inconsiderate drivers in the world.
But by any standards the British are amazingly obliging and they get even nicer as you head north.
Get stuck in the wrong lane, need to make a right turn across a line of traffic, or get confused by the road signs and go the wrong way and instead of copping an angry digit and a bullbar up your bumper, you'll almost always find someone smilingly stopping to wave you through.
That courtesy and the fact that the language and the roading system are so familiar mean it is still fairly easy to find your own way around in a rental car.
Which is just as well, because the trains we used were all completely overloaded - in four rail journeys we only got a seat once - though to be fair they were also fast and reliable.
What also greatly assisted was having a good book of maps in Philip's 2007 Road Atlas of Britain (Octopus, $39.99).
It has good clear maps and is easy to follow from page to page, which meant we were never lost, in spite of the crazy signposting in some areas.
Better still, it has excellent approach maps for the many cities and tourist destinations, allowing us to get into places like Canterbury and Oxford, which were never designed for cars, and even central Manchester, which one local described as "the easiest place in Britain to get lost in".
In medieval cities such as Canterbury and Oxford you're actually better off parking and walking, or using the efficient local bus services, and helpfully the approach maps also show the position of parking areas.
We did find that the very small type could be difficult to read in the dim light of a grey British winter, so if I used the atlas there again I think I'd take a magnifying glass.
But overall it was a great investment and, in conjunction with a good guide book, made planning our trip in advance much easier.
Because we were planning to visit England and Scotland, the guide book I opted for was the Lonely Planet Guide to Britain (Lonely Planet, $60.99).
It's a chunky volume to lug around but it packs in almost all the information you could ever want about the main tourist attractions, opening hours, good places to eat, where to stay and unexpected things to see.
If it wasn't for Lonely Planet's advice I would never have thought to take time out from inspecting the vast fortifications of Dover Castle to see the Museum of Dover and its amazing Iron Age boat.
I didn't take with me, but did use to plan the trip, the Daily Telegraph Guide to Britain's Military Heritage and the Daily Telegraph Guide to England's Parish Churches (Aurum, $50).
If you're interested in fortifications and castles - and what big little boy isn't? - the military heritage book is a marvellous source of information, not just about the structures themselves but also the key battles which took place around them.
To understand the Battle of Hastings, for example, it helps to find out about the Battle of Stamford Bridge, in Yorkshire, where King Harold defeated a Viking army under Harald Hardrada before racing back south to Sussex and very nearly beating the Normans under William the Conqueror.
The book on churches naturally can't cover all of the 16,000 which exist and, somewhat to my disappointment, had no mention of three I was particularly interested in.
But it offers some wonderful suggestions of churches worth visiting when you're in a particular area.
If you're in Brighton, for instance, after checking out the extraordinary Royal Pavilion it's well worth visiting the much less-known St Bartholomew's Church, with its amazing decor, described as "Byzantium with an art nouveau flavour".
Finally, if you're a fan of Ian Rankin's marvellous thrillers about Detective Inspector John Rebus, there could be no better companion for a visit north of the border than his Rebus's Scotland (Orion, $59.99).
This came out a year ago but didn't have any great relevance to me until I was about to visit Scotland.
It's a marvellously evocative tapestry in which Rankin's life and that of his detective character are interwoven against a background of Scotland past and present.
Again, I didn't take the book with me, but reading it before I left meant I wandered around Edinburgh with a much greater appreciation of the forces which have shaped the city ... and its best-known detective.
