DON’T LOOK ETHEL!

I don’t know that I would win any awards for my driving skills, but I can say that in the only accident I’ve ever been in I was not the one behind the steering wheel at the time.  I’ve never even hit a deer. One did hit me once, but I don’t think that should count.

What I do know is that I feel better when I am the one in control of the speed/steering/brakes.  I don’t know that I can claim I’m an excellent driver but I totally confess to being a horrible passenger. The perfect illustration of this was a trip I took with my very capable, intelligent, in-charge daughter to the British Isles.

At first it was lovely: we visited with my Aunt in Oxford for the first week and then we took the train north to Glasgow where we rented a car and drove the reminder of the trip to Edinburgh.  I just refreshed my memory with a look at a map of Scotland; the distance we drove is negligible.  Paltry.  Puny.  Compared to the ground we cover here on the prairies it is miniscule.  It aged us both several decades.

The obvious hurdle was that we were in a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road.  This should have been no problem because the girl I was with had spent more than a year in New Zealand and Australia – she knew what she was doing in that department.  The trouble was more that this arrangement puts the passenger sitting where a Canadian driver should be but doesn’t give her a steering wheel to hang on to.

I’m not going to say that I didn’t go into it without a little trepidation.  The whole ‘wrong side of the road/wrong side of the vehicle’ thing is a little mind bending.  It’s not even safe to cross a street unless you look the wrong way (but that was a whole other trip, and nobody died, so it’s all good).  Even as we took out the rental car I wondered why on Earth they would let people from other countries even do that, but off we went anyway, heavily insured. 

A couple things about driving in a medieval city: the streets are narrow, the signs give you 1.7 seconds warning of where to turn, and there is no where to pull over and take a breather. Even so we made it out on the open road where it would have been lovely to stop and experience the Scottish Highlands but again, they don’t do the ‘pull over and go sight-seeing’ thing over there.  We drove on.

I had joked ahead of time that she would do the driving and I would do the praying.  By the time we’d been on the road for a while I commented that maybe there were circumstances where valium was a good idea.  Not long after that my sweet daughter muttered through clenched teeth that this was certainly one of them. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures: I glued my mouth shut and my body to my seat, not saying another word or twitching another muscle as my contribution to safe arrival.  It worked.  We saw the sights (well except for the Loch Ness Monster; nobody ever sees her) and lived to tell about it.  It’s been twenty years and the story is funny again.

What I learned from that experience was that I’m better off not looking at the road if it’s only going to make me all anxious and jittery – my antics only make the driver anxious and jittery too.  I am much better off to focus on something else – you know, for the safety of everyone involved?

Fast forward to last Tuesday, #1 Highway between Portage and Winnipeg.  The sun shining brightly, the sky is blue above us, but there is ground drifting with white-out conditions and the pavement is warm enough for the snow to stick and turn to ice.

I wasn’t the one driving (thank goodness!) so in an effort to distract my dread I picked up my phone to text loved ones a fond farewell, thinking my feigned calmness would relieve some of the tension.  Much to my surprise I was asked to “Put that thing down and help me watch for things!”

That’s how bad it was folks, he wanted me to back-seat drive.

I guess four eyes are better than two.  But also, whether it’s two times zero or four times zero, the answer is still zero.

Long story short – both the driver and the navigator, plus the oblivious dog in the back – made it there and home again safely.  Sometimes you get to cross something off your Bucket List that you hadn’t even put on it.