Rick Steves has a rule for England: rent a car for the countryside, take the train in the cities. Obvious advice once you hear it. But you'd be surprised how many people try to drive through London (nightmare) or rely on rural bus routes that test your patience in ways you didn't know were possible.

Steves laid out his thinking in a recent piece on handling England's logistics. The short version: public transit works well in cities and on major rail corridors. Get out into the smaller villages, the national parks, the coastal stretches, and a car gives you the freedom to pull over at a stone circle, take the back road through the Cotswolds, or chase a sunset on the Devon coast without checking a timetable.

I've spent enough time on English back roads to know Steves is right. The best stuff in rural England isn't at the end of a train line. It's down a narrow lane between two hedgerows with grass growing down the middle. You can't get to those places without wheels.

I'd add my own two cents from years of doing this kind of driving: England's roads will humble you. Those hedgerows I mentioned aren't decorative. They're solid walls of vegetation and stone, and the lanes between them are narrow enough that every few hundred meters there's a little pull-out where you're supposed to somehow maneuver into it while another car waits. The entire system runs on a polite choreography of backing up and waving each other through. My first time driving in Yorkshire, the whole backing-into-a-passing-place-on-a-hill thing went badly enough that a local farmer in an ancient Land Rover just sat there waiting, didn't honk, and gave me a nod when I finally got out of his way. That's English country driving in a nutshell.

Steves's general principle is that a car is a hassle in big cities but essential for the countryside. I'd take that further with my own list: skip the rental entirely in Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge too. These are walkable cities with good transit, and parking will cost you more than your dinner. Pick up the car on your way out of town, drop it before you come back in.

A few practical things if you're planning this: get the smallest car you can fit into. Narrow lanes reward small vehicles. Brush up on your manual transmission skills or pay the automatic upgrade fee, your call. And get full insurance coverage, because those hedgerows leave marks.

England's countryside is some of the most quietly beautiful terrain I've ever hiked through, and having a car to explore it at your own pace changes everything. Just don't try it in the cities.