Lessons 5 & 6 Crossroads & Emergancy Stop

25th January 2009

Lessons 5 & 6 Crossroads & Emergancy Stop

Today's lesson started off unusually on this sunny Sunday morning, by which I mean to say nothing went wrong on my end. Once Simon and I had reached the car I was immediately instructed to step into the driving seat, this was the second and final of the unusual events that were to take place that morning, was Simon starting to show some faith in my driving abilities?
I was fairly confident that Simon could not come up with anything that would drastically challenge my recently acquired driving capabilities, but as usual I was wrong. What was also unsuspected however, was the fact that the hurdle I would fall at would be something I had apparently mastered the lesson before, junctions. It very rapidly became abundantly clear to me that junctions were a completely different kettle of fish when there were other cars on the road with me.
I must admit when I stepped in the car that morning I was a little sleep deprived, being a Sunday morning, and it may have affected my mood as I was becoming increasingly aggravated, and repeating the same junction in that short period of time did not seem to be helping. Simon seemed to notice this deterioration in my mood and we started to move away from the junction and started navigating T-junctions, roundabouts and traffic lights and unsurprisingly my mood started to improve exponentially, but what was surprising however, was the fact that my driving did too.
After having travelled what felt like along way we finally pulled over and discussed what we had just been over and went about smoothing out the creases in my performance. We then started to talk about the process of an emergency stop. In that moment I had felt the happiest I had since stepping in the car three weeks ago, this was plain and simply to do with the fact that all I had to do was slam on the brakes, not even I could do that wrong, or could I? We headed off and on my first attempt I stopped and I had even managed to prevent the car from stalling. After we had done a number of other practice emergency stops I was instructed to head home. I got home relatively safely, apart from someone who obviously enjoys tooting at learners for no reason sounding their horn at me, and parked the car. After a debriefing from Simon we parted ways and I was feeling confident and excited for the next lesson I would have.