I Thought I Could Drive

...but apparently I can't, at least not stick shift in a 20+ years-old pickup over desert "roads." So today we had a driving lesson. Here's the story:  Jillian (my dining room partner) and I will be in charge of bringing the food to the lunch picnic every Saturday. It's a lot of stuff so we need the truck bed to get it all in. As I mentioned, the truck is very old, beat up, stick shift, and also pretty small. This is not some huge Dodge Ram type of truck that could plow through most anything. This is a cute little white Toyota, and although it got us faithfully there and back, I would not say that we were "plowing" through at all. It was like a really bumpy roller coaster ride! (Maybe I exaggerate a little.)

Craig, one of the maintenance/groundskeepers, (see picture in Halloween Party post) took us out to show us how to get to the three picnic sites and how to drive the truck. Here's one clip from the adventure:  Going to the south side site, which is used most frequently, there is what everyone refers to as a dip. We kept hearing last night about The Dip and how you could easily get stuck if you didn't take it right. So we come to the dip, and let's just say, I would have labeled it a hole. A dip is sort of the opposite of a speed bump, right? This is a big, deep hole. About a 75-degree angle in and out and maybe 20-25 ft deep. But Jillian and I both drove through the dip like pros. Leave it in first, very slowly down, and gas as soon as the front wheels hit the bottom. I thought it was easy. 

My problems occur in the starting and stopping moments. And in the fact that the old truck seat would not move very far forward so I had to sit almost on the edge to reach the clutch. (Craig said they'll have to do something about fixing that seat, but we'll see; I think he found it very amusing -- and it was.) Anyway, it was difficult to remember the order of clutch, brake, gas, shift, etc while bouncing along very bumpy narrow dirt roads avoiding big rocks and with Jillian giggling next to me and Craig shouting things like, "At this fork, we go left. You never ever go down that road to the right. Left, not right. At the fork, go left! Which way do we go?" I don't think we'll have any trouble finding the sites again; the directional mantras are burned into our brains!

So I stalled some, and we'll have to practice the reversing a bit more, but on the whole I did pretty well -- Craig gave us both a score of 88. :-)  I hope you are reading this and laughing -- we were laughing the whole 3 hours on the road. One of the most fun and hilarious mornings I've had in a long time.