Friday, June 22, 2007

Learning to Drive

Did you learn to drive when you were a teenager? Who taught you? If at school, what kind of driver's ed was it? If a friend or parent, where did you go to learn? What was the worse part about learning to drive?

I was first taught to drive by Challenge Driving School when I was about 15. In those days you didn't have to have a learners licence you just got taught to drive. I was doing quite well with learning from them when one day I had to pull out of a quiet road on to a really busy road with 4 lanes of traffic. My driving instructor said to me before I pulled out, "you are going to need to get up to 50km/h really quickly because this is a very busy road & people go fast." So I looked & no traffic was coming & I pulled out, I got up to 50km/h & then looked in my rear vision mirror to see a red car come hurtling at me. He was going way faster than me & just rear ended me. I was absolutely shocked, the drving instructor helped me drive the car off the road & then we had to call the police & give all the details to the police. There had been other people who saw the whole thing & said in no way was it my fault. I then went back to the driving school base & caught a bus home feeling very upset. I was the lucky one of the two of us because my driving instuctor got severe whiplash around her neck & she couldn't drive for weeks. I couldn't drive for weeks, not because I was physically hurt, but because I was too shaken & scared off what could happen next time I got in the car.

Mum then took over for a while on the quiet back roads of Lincoln, just getting me to drive up & down the road. Eventually I did go back to Challenge Driving school & got a different instructor & passed my licence.

To this day I still hate cars driving up behind me to fast & the only accidents I have been in are when I get rear ended, lukily it hasn't been often, but once was when I had the children in the back, & that of course freeked me out again. People don't seem to realise thast cars aren't indestructable & really they can be very powerful killing machines in the hands of the wrong people.

2 comments:

loonyhiker said...

My hubby is very paranoid about cars racing up behind us. Of course he has been rearended before and I haven't. He always starts pumping his brakes so his red lights are flashing to get the driver's attention.

Karen said...

Oh wow. Something like that would have totally undermined my confidence too Katrina. Full marks to you for getting back into it again at 15. Not sure I would have been able to do that at that age.