It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged, so perhaps it’s time to generally ‘catch up’. It’s been a crazy, difficult, terrible, and wonderful Spring. Isn’t life just like that?
Since the winter thaw, our lives have been largely consumed with A’s bid for re-election to the council, a bout of illness, and perhaps most significantly, my driving.
After allowing myself to develop a bit of a phobia about driving here, I took the plunge and bought a car! (Note: I bought said car before I really even tried driving much). I figured buying a car would magically inspire me to get moving. It did and it didn’t. There are people (A for example) who can go to a country and just automatically start driving on the opposite side of the road with new rules, signs, and conditions with no problem. Unfortunately I seem to be lacking that application in the brain as well as the built-in GPS that some seem to possess. Being a hopeless navigator doesn’t help matters. Nonetheless, I have steeled myself and am getting on with it.
Being a Kansas gal, I’m used to flat terrain, long and straight horizons, a lack of need for parallel parking, wide roads and generally easy driving. I’ve swapped these for hills (sometimes with drop-offs), narrow and bendy roads, tight squeezes, and a definite lack of parking. To the credit of folks here who live with roads not originally designed for automobile traffic, people are generally calm, courteous, and tend to just work things out between themselves in a very civilized civilised manner.
My first priority was to find an automatic transmission when buying a car. These are rather rare and it wasn’t easy locating one that met all my other requirements in a car. In the end, I compromised and settled on a ‘semi-automatic’. It’s supposed to have the ‘best of both’, with what looks like a ‘stick shift’ that enables one to ‘shift’ between drive, neutral, and reverse, or shift between gears albeit sans clutch. Much to my chagrin and eventual amusement, I’ve come to realize a few things:
- A is for Drive. (A is for Drive???!). Actually, A is probably for ‘automatic’ but it did give me some pause and took some getting used to.
- There is no gear for ‘Park’! One must park in either neutral or reverse (wise when parked on the decline of a very steep hill).
- The car actually rolls backwards when stopped on a steep incline. This is not something that people who drive automatics ever have to worry about. I had no idea what to do the first time this happened to me and thankfully there wasn’t a car behind me. Eventually (and thankfully), someone taught me how to use the emergency brake to my advantage like normal people who drive manuals do.
- When cold and not warmed up, the car seems to jerk dramatically when driving down the steep hill from our house. It’s like it fights me and hates ‘coasting’. (Or maybe it hates a hopelessly Midwestern American fiercely old-school automatic driver complaining about it).
- No matter how good a marriage may be, not all husbands can teach their wives how to drive without argument.
In all, I still have miles to go before I’m ready to sit the driving test here, but have made what for me are great strides. I am much more comfortable on the roads now generally, though still have a lot of procedures, navigation issues, and kinks to work out.
As for Spring, like any season it suits Cumbria. It’s a beautiful time of year and I’m still happy to be here.
