Monday, March 3, 2008

Excellent Day

Well after a weekend of relaxation and catching up on sleep I headed into school today in driving rain, howling cold wind from the north and a rapidly dropping temperature, damn it was 80 degrees yesterday. Oh well.

Because of traffic due to the weather I was about twenty minutes late and got there and Perry was already doing backing runs, and sure enough he was doing pretty damn good. Not perfect but he would pass the DPS test for parking if he took it today.

Same for me, Dale only had one comment on my morning backing runs and that was my tractor tires went over the line once during one of my runs, but not by much he said. I've worked the parallel parking down from five steps with one pull-up to three steps with no pull-up. I even did some 45's today which was a nice change of pace.

After an early lunch we headed out for road driving. Perry drove first and once we got on the highway we went about 40 miles to a small town southwest of Dallas and did what I describe as traffic management driving.

Basically we did an eight mile loop along the service roads of the highway, up and down shifting, watching traffic and yielding to off ramps. Tons of stop signs and traffic congestion, and four VERY sharp left turns from two lane service roads to one lane bridge underpasses. Was very good practice.

After we each did two complete circuits of the service roads, I drove us back to the campus and the day was over.

Perry did very well today on his driving, he is still very timid (due to low self-confidence) and he easily gets overwhelmed by all the things he has to do and screws up his shifting patterns and rhythm, but he is finally starting to get it. Hopefully by test day he'll put it all together.

One thing to mention as well is it was raining and sleeting all day long, and even had some hail at one point when we had a good passing thunderstorm. All that driving in traffic combined with the weather and cold temperatures was good practice, and was a hell of a lot of fun even if it was stressful at times.

Doing the same thing again tomorrow, and at the moment it is snowing out side, should be fun. Because we all know that most Texans can't drive in bad weather, let alone any other time for that matter.

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