January 18th - Driving a stick
Jan. 23rd, 2011 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurcheLast week, the brakes on my car started letting out a horrid squealing sound whenever I tried using them... and since I was within 500 miles of needing the 90,000 mile service, we went ahead and took it in to get everything done at once. This meant that I was without my car for a few days (since they couldn't get us in until after the holiday) and had to drive Rackham's MINI Cooper!
A feeling of power...
The console for the MINI is so different... it took a bit to get used to having the speedometer in the middle when we first got the car. If you look down the right, you can actually see the Star Wars beach bag made by my friend JediHealer that I won in a teacup auction a few years back. I use it to haul around the stuff I use for Cub Scouts.
I must admit that I get a bit of a thrill every time I drive a car with a standard transmission. My dad tried to teach me how to drive with a stick when I was 15/16 years old, but it just wasn't happening (we kept losing patience with each other). I was always disappointed by my failure to learn because of a book I'd read when I was 12... in The Weathermonger by Peter Dickinson, one of the characters is learning how to drive and the statement gets made that everyone should learn to drive a stick because a driver should be smarter than the car. So, yeah... you can imagine how well it went over in my teenage mind that I wasn't smarter than my car!
When I was in my 20s, my mom and step-dad gave us their old VW Bug as a second car. Rackham used it to drive to work and eventually took me out on some old country roads and taught me how to drive it. It was *so* much easier than when I'd tried learning the first time... because I already knew how to drive, to the point where I didn't even have to think about that aspect of it and could just concentrate on making the car work. After the first time being able to pull the car out onto the road and shift into second gear, it went smoothly. I quickly got a feel for the car and I loved driving the bug around.
But, like I said, I still get that tiny thrill when I take a stick-shift out for a spin, because it was one of those things that had escaped me for so long and now I can do it without thinking. Plus there's something so incredibly cool in the feeling of shifting gears while accelerating onto the freeway.
A feeling of power...
The console for the MINI is so different... it took a bit to get used to having the speedometer in the middle when we first got the car. If you look down the right, you can actually see the Star Wars beach bag made by my friend JediHealer that I won in a teacup auction a few years back. I use it to haul around the stuff I use for Cub Scouts.
I must admit that I get a bit of a thrill every time I drive a car with a standard transmission. My dad tried to teach me how to drive with a stick when I was 15/16 years old, but it just wasn't happening (we kept losing patience with each other). I was always disappointed by my failure to learn because of a book I'd read when I was 12... in The Weathermonger by Peter Dickinson, one of the characters is learning how to drive and the statement gets made that everyone should learn to drive a stick because a driver should be smarter than the car. So, yeah... you can imagine how well it went over in my teenage mind that I wasn't smarter than my car!
When I was in my 20s, my mom and step-dad gave us their old VW Bug as a second car. Rackham used it to drive to work and eventually took me out on some old country roads and taught me how to drive it. It was *so* much easier than when I'd tried learning the first time... because I already knew how to drive, to the point where I didn't even have to think about that aspect of it and could just concentrate on making the car work. After the first time being able to pull the car out onto the road and shift into second gear, it went smoothly. I quickly got a feel for the car and I loved driving the bug around.
But, like I said, I still get that tiny thrill when I take a stick-shift out for a spin, because it was one of those things that had escaped me for so long and now I can do it without thinking. Plus there's something so incredibly cool in the feeling of shifting gears while accelerating onto the freeway.
