Permission Granted

Thursday morning, for the last time, Megan and I left the house at 7am, grabbed a Circle-K coffee and split a protein drink, and headed over to the MVD.  It was just chilly enough, and the line was short, that we waited comfortably in the van, chatting and people-watching as our fellow citizens arrived, until the doors opened at 8.  Megan entered the testing room at 8:30, and exited at 8:36 with the grin of success plastered all over her cute little face.

I was going to give her a break and drive home, before letting her get behind the wheel to take her first shot at in-town driving, but she grabbed the keys from me on the way out of the building, and that was that.  With fear and trepidation I climbed into the passenger seat and thus began the adventuresome ride home, which included a rather wide right turn onto a main thoroughfare as we exited the MVD parking lot that almost killed both us and the guy driving the silver pickup that had to swerve to miss us as we transgressed his lane… after that we took the long way home, practicing signaling, changing lanes, and left turns at stop lights and it was mostly wonderful and smooth and my heart-rate was able to return to the normal zone.

Achieving a satisfactory parking spot along the sidewalk in front of our house, with no other cars anywhere in sight, proved to be unexpectedly complex, and involved a great deal of jockeying back and forth and overcompensating both onto the sidewalk and out into the street…. clearly there will need to be much practice with parallel parking.

After lunch, there was another driving session which took a circuitous route to the grocery store, and gave her more practice with two and four-way stops, driving through school zones, and navigating parking lots.

All in all, she is an excellent driver, and I’m confident that by the grace of God and some overtime on the part of our Guardian Angels, we will survive.