Having a travel partner can be challenging. You want to tour the house where John and Paul wrote over a hundred songs together; he’d rather see the Beatles museum. You want a salad; he wants a hot dog from a vendor. There isn’t time for everything, and there certainly isn’t enough money for everything. The emotional and physical challenges are, however, in most cases, far outweighed by the financial benefits of traveling with another person.

I have a new traveling partner. Circumstance brings us together really. We both have similar destinations on our agenda; we both want to see as much of Europe on the smallest possible budget while we’re in school here. He’s an undergraduate, in his early twenties, and a Christian from Wisconsin. It might seem that we have very little in common, and at times, we do indeed seem to speak different languages. But, when we met and began talking at the university’s international orientation, we quickly connected; so we decided to give traveling together a whirl.

Our first day trip to Cambridge went exceptionally well, so this weekend we decided to go to Manchester and then on to Liverpool, both on the opposite coast from where our campus is located. We checked out bus and train tickets, and both were quite expensive as the cheap-booking dates had passed (we didn’t plan too far in advance for this one). He brought up the idea of renting a car. I might not have considered this on my own. I haven’t owned a car in three years and try to make mass transit use my first option, but, honestly, I’ve been craving some time behind the wheel. And I wanted to try the “wrong-side” driving thing. His inventiveness here has been one of several circumstances prompting me to accept the fact that two minds are often truly better than one. He did the detail checking, and the car was cheaper, by half, of a single round-trip bus ticket; also, a valid U.S. driver’s license is all one needs to rent a car in the U.K. I’m not exactly sure why, but no preemptive foreign driving lessons are required.

We put my name on the reservation since I’m older, and we were in turn able to save big on the insurance. We split the cost on the car and decided next time we’d recruit others to join us and bring the price down even more.

I rode my bike to the airport and picked up the Fiat. I don’t think I was completely mentally prepared for what it was going to be like. After almost fifteen years of driving, a lovely drive through the English countryside sounded no more than incredibly relaxing. Behind the wheel however, I was suddenly thirteen again and overwhelmed. Muscle memory is an amazing thing. My entire physical cognition was turned inside out. I kept chanting the word ‘œleft’ at every light to remind myself into which lane to proceed. Sitting on the right side of the car also implanted in me some weird fear of the center line, and I found myself constantly bumping over the lane reflector pads left of me and taking the occasional curb check. My spatial awareness had completely vanished. Then there’s the shifting. First gear was not comfortably next to me but opposite its familiar position, requiring me to push into it instead of pulling it into me. It was far from relaxing, but fun, however, like a new video game.

I picked an atlas up at the 99 pence store, and my travel partner randomly chose our route to the western seashore. He did a fantastic job; we traversed the gorgeous Peak District National Park, including miles of old, narrow highway cut through pasture lands, patterned and partitioned by dry-stone walls. We took turns behind the wheel and saw areas we would never have seen on public transportation.

The driving quickly turned to competition, who could get better more quickly; and that’s when I discovered some new things about my traveling buddy. He’s quite particular. He began to instruct me incessantly on driving. Fortunately, I’m well versed with bossy people, so I wasn’t too put off. At one point, he told me it would be best if I stayed in the middle lane of the freeway because it’s the most economical. His argument was that it saves gas mileage on the curves. This sounded absurd to me. A string of other instructions followed. I opened my mouth, but all I could say was, ‘œYou’re going to make a great forensic scientist,’ which is what he’s studying to become.

Fortunately, his ‘œeconomical’ attention to detail extends into every other part of his perspective as well, which makes for great frugal traveling. He can spot an ad for a cheap burger and a pint deal from 2 or 3 blocks away, and he’s as excited about sighting the lowest gas prices as he is a medieval castle.

Our first night in Manchester, we decided on another way to save some money. We would forgo the hostel and get double use out of the rented car. We would sleep in it. So, we drove blindly out of Manchester and took a number of random turns until we found an open gate into a fallow farm field, overlooking a valley and protected by a hedge from the road. The second night, we repeated the plan but drove up the coast north from Liverpool instead until we found an empty beach to park on. The sleep wasn’t great, I’ll admit, but the morning views were so much better than a thick hostel dorm with eight or ten coughing strangers.

Traveling alone is really rewarding and will maybe always be my favorite way to go. You get to know yourself in the most hideous ways, faults all blown out of proportion. Sharing experiences and ideas, however, has exponential benefits.