This is just an odd little story from my life.
Way back when I was
learning to drive, there was some deal that if you took lessons from the school’s
driving instructor, your parents would get a discount when you got your
insurance. I don’t know what the policy
is these days. So I was signed up to
drive for four or five days during the summer.
The instructor drove out to our house out in the boonies, and then I’d
drive back to town to show I knew what I was doing. Every now and then he’d point to a parking
spot and have me parallel park into it. We’d
find a quiet side street and he’d have me do a 3 Point Turn. After about an hour, he’d direct me to the
house of the next kid, who would then drive me back home as the first part of
his driving lesson.
The last day I had to
drive, at the end I had to go to a new house to pick up a new kid. So the instructor sent me out some road I’d
never been on before, and we soon came to some construction. The traffic was backed up pretty far, and it
looked like we’d be there for some time slowly inching forward. Well, we were stopped right at a restaurant,
or something, so he had me pull in to the parking lot. Fortunately, there were three or four random
businesses that shared this parking lot, so I drove from before the restaurant’s
area of the lot, through the dry cleaner’s section, to the gun store
section. But that was where the lot
ended. If I had gotten back on the road,
we would have passed twenty or so cars.
But we would still have been backed up.
The next business was a
liquor store, or whatever, and their parking lot was separated from the one we
were in by three-foot-wide patch of grass.
I don’t remember if there was a curb, but if there was it was only an
inch or so. The instructor told me to
drive over the grass into the liquor store parking lot. I don’t know what exactly I was thinking, but
I think I was just too scared to say anything, so I drove into the liquor store
parking lot.
But then, on the other
side of the liquor store parking lot, there was a hedge row, or a stone wall
that almost reached the road. I think
the reason it didn’t go all the way to the road was because there was a
telephone pole there, and there’s probably some statute about how much space
needs to be around a telephone pole. The
distance from the pole to the hedge was probably about six inches wider than
the car, so the instructor told me to drive through it. Fortunately, the gas station or whatever
parking lot we were in now, was either beyond the construction area, or was at
an intersection where we could continue on to the new kid’s house.
Once my nerves settled, I
had to admit the whole thing was pretty funny.
I can only imagine what the other drivers, or the construction workers
thought as they saw a Student Driver Car off-roading to get around them. But I do wonder if I had shown myself to be an
okay enough driver that he wasn’t worried, or did the instructor just hate
being stuck in traffic that much.
