Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Today's Path: Learning To Drive a Manual

Okay, so this isn't on My 50 List, but it is now accomplished. This past Sunday, my friend took me to a school parking lot and we drove in circles for what seemed like forever.

Now for the back story:

My car has reached the point in its life that I need to trade it in or sell it. However, when I get rid of my car I am going to need another one. To broaden the amount of cars that I can buy, I decided I needed to learn how to drive a stick.

Back to the story:

My friend walked me through what she was doing when we went to the school. Once there we switched spots, and it was my turn to drive. Who would have known getting it into first was going to be the hardest part of the day? Of course I stalled the car a couple of times...well more like 20 over the course of the day (Honestly, I lost count).

The second hardest thing was conquering the hill. When I say hill, I mean most likely not even a 1% grade hill. I killed the car a couple times, but I made it through.

About 90 minutes later, my friend asked me to drive her home. WHAT?!?!?! Are you kidding me? Drive on a road where there are other cars? I laughed at her and then took the bull by the horns and drove her home.

YES, after 90 mins. I drove on the road. The best part was I didn't kill the car once on the way home. So it can be done.

What do you want to conquer?

Rock on,
Lane J

3 Comments:

Julie said...

Hi Lane,

Just happened upon your blog and thought I would drop a comment. When I learned to drive stick it was S-C-A-R-Y! So I made myself a promise to learn, but bought an automatic.

You ask what do we want to conquer? Getting my step-son to college. We need all the help we can get.

Rock On!
Julie

Anonymous said...

Yay to you for learning how to drive a stick! It's not easy, but once you get the hang of it, it's kinda fun - makes you feel like you're REALLY driving!

I would like to conquer my fear of failing. A lot of times I don't even try new things or things I really want to do because I'm afraid to fail.

Anonymous said...

Well done, it gets better the more you practice it.

There seems to be a lot of people in the US now wanting to drive a manual car, and I'm wondering why since you've always loved automatics.

Here in the UK, most people start driving lessons in manual cars, and only move to automatics if they find it to difficult.

So are you getting a manual car next?