About to attempt something a little crazy

Yes even more crazy than a person who is afraid of flying being let lose in a plane on her own.

I am about to ……

….renew my driving license.

You may not really understand the enormity of this so a little history lesson for you.

“Once upon a time WMAP learned to drive. Back in England where roads are scary and transmissions are definitely not automatic. Eventually after many, many lessons she even reached the stage where a driving examiner was willing to say “you’ve passed.”

However, young WMAP was only 18 at the time and a penniless student. Purchasing a car was out of the question and her parents didn’t drive. WMAP was without wheels. A condition which lasted well into her graduate and post graduate studies.

Along the way WMAP married RTH, as it turned out RTH was a much better driver than WMAP, who secretly didn’t really like driving anyway. It involved things like quick decision making, spatial awareness, not hitting things, none of which WMAP would list as her strong points.

So WMAP and RTH came to an understanding, you see whilst being an excellent driver RTH was not particularly fond of alcohol. The deal was WMAP drank, RTH drove! This understanding lasted over 16 years of marriage.

When RTH and WMAP started their new life in Toronto, a car was not needed. In fact having a car was a liability in their chosen locale. Occasionally RTH would rent a car for a few hours or days as needed and WMAP would happily sit along for the ride. WMAP did however manage to acquire an Ontario Driving license because technically she’d held a British one for over 2 years. This was used purely for photo ID purposes.

In total since acquiring either driving license WMAP had driven a grand total of less than 10 miles. All of it in England, all of it on the left hand side and all of it in a manual transmission car.”

…history lesson over then you may ask yourself as to what has caused this sudden desire to get back behind the wheel.  Well nothing major or Earth shattering, there’s just a little part of me that thinks it is totally ludicrous that I fly a plane but won’t drive a car. I mean even parking a car should be a doddle now that I can happily taxi a plane around.  Cars don’t have massive wings bolted to the side for one thing.

It’ll give me more options if I want to go away and do stuff on my own, or if we are away and RTH just wants a break from the driving. I really have no plans to drive in Toronto (few sane people do) but I guess it’ll be a handy skill to have as a backup.

The short term aim is that next time we rent a car. I’ll go on as a named driver and we’ll find a quiet stretch of road for me to have a go on. I honestly can’t be as bad as some of the people I see out there.

First step though, dealing with Service Ontario and renewing my expired license.