By the way, if anyone wants it, I've got a strip command that's working pretty well so far in my test cases. The line is:

discard="((Start|End)\sPoint|follow|Continue onto|Continue on|continue|Continue|bears?|Bear|bear|turn|TURN|Turn |Go |into the |Take the|Take |Merge into|into|to |Set by click|sharply|left at|right at|left|right|straight|onto|as road goes into|as it|Head\s(North|West|East|South)\son)\s?"

And you have to chage the comment mark here so that the strip command gets called:

self.desc = re.sub(discard, "", desc).strip()
#self.desc = desc.strip()