Wednesday 25 February 2015

Driving!

I passed my practical driving test on Tuesday. It was my second time round, as I failed my first test a couple of weeks before it, mostly because of two stupid mistakes that I made, one being on a roundabout.
To digress, the roundabouts around Salisbury are so much more complex than any other roundabout in cities & towns the size of Salisbury or even bigger. I feel learning to drive around the Salisbury area is good because of this, as it can help understand more complex roads. It is also quite nice as a lot of the areas are quite slow driving areas, which helps keep your driving slow and steady.
When I first failed I was quite disheartened, because in general the drive was quite good, and if I had not got too anxious and stressed out, I wouldn't have made those stupid errors.
This time, I definitely learned my lesson, keeping calm right from the word go. I think it helped infinitely with the test, stopping me from rushing giving my ample time to plan things up ahead.

I went for my first independent drive tonight, out to my Judo club. I am reasonably happy driving at night and I had done the drive many times before with my dad, yet as I set off, I started to feel slightly on edge. The drive went fine other than a hill start that I stalled at because I was hurriedly attempting to skip a track on my ipod while the lights were red.
The physical exercise helped me chill out, and after I had finished, I was much more relaxed on the drive back.

Over all i'm pretty happy about this, as I should be. Finally, freedom to go where I want when I want, which will be great for some days at college where I have to wait ages to catch a bus that takes about an hour and a half to get home, whereas I can drive back in half an hour.
The downsides are people wanting lifts (which i'll be happy to do if they repay me in some way, or if taking their diversion benefits me), and i'll still have the issues of going drinking, which means i'll likely still be using buses some of the time. I suppose at least there are buses home at 12 o'clock on Fridays and Saturdays, could be worse...

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