Driving Lesson

Alison is going this week to get her learner’s permit.  In fact, she’ll be getting it (fingers crossed) the day before we leave for Nationals.  After their competition, she went to a friend’s house who was having a party to hang out for a few hours.  I had to pick her up at midnight (since she can’t drive) and with the snow we were getting the roads were very, very empty.  I thought this would be a good chance for a driving lesson.  She could get some experience driving in the snow as well as some time actually on the road with very little traffic.  Plus, with the snow, she’d have to drive slowly and with no other cars out we wouldn’t need to worry about holding up any other traffic. 

It was probably about five miles to her friend’s house.  But when I picked her up, she said she didn’t want to drive the whole way, but would do about half.  So when we got about halfway, I pulled over and let her get behind the wheel.  She didn’t do too badly, though we did do a little bit of drifting.  I am not sure if that was because she couldn’t see the centerline of the road, or if the bumps in the road were causing the car to slide around a little bit, or if she was drifting on her own.  I told her to do her best to keep the tires aligned with the tracks already in the snow.  Then we came to almost a complete stop when making the turn onto our road, and when she went to turn into our driveway, she overshot and missed.  I never realized that making a turn was so difficult.  Turns will definitely be a skill we will need to work on coming up.