Let's hit the open road.....

Hoooooray!  Today I successfully passed the Texas driving test - if you can call it that.  What an experience.....it does explain an awful lot about the state of American driving!

First they took a look around the car to make sure the lights etc were all functioning.  After negotiating about 10 minutes of paperwork and discussing whether "insured by Weatherford for Weatherford employees" meant that I was okay - apparently it does, the examiner got in and we proceeded to drive around the car park.  After doing a "parallel park" into a space you could probably land a Harrier in we took to the open road.  The test consisted of about 6 right hand turns, 2 lefts and some reversing (more on that in a moment).

After completing all of this I was asked to park in the car park and await an assistant who would come out with my temporary license.  Start to finish the test was about 7 minutes long - of actual driving, a further 10 minutes of paperwork and about an hour of just sitting around waiting.

This feels like the last real piece of the puzzle of settling in Texas - you get some seriously funny looks when handing over a UK license as ID.

An interesting observation we both made this week is that sometimes instructions seem to get lost in translation.  A prime example of this was during the test when I was asked to complete the reversing portion of the test.  The examiner asked me to stop and then "reverse straight back".  At this point in time we were still in the car park.  So I dutifully reversed in a laser beam straight line feeling pretty smug about my impressive backwards skills.  Unfortunately at the end of the test it transpired I lost some marks for control because she had actually wanted me to reverse around the sweeping bend on one side (approx 10 feet away from where we were parked).  Now, perhaps an American would've interpreted this differently - I like to think so.....there have been a few other moments, including during the theory test when you have to think like an American to get the right answer!

We also received our first US cheque (or check for the Yanks) book.  Rather niftily you can actually personalise your cheques......wanting to embrace the culture fully, this is what I created:

Pretty nifty I think - and very American!  Oddly everyone still uses cheques for just about everything here!

Laura has her shot at driving on Friday - I'm sure she'll do fine now I know a bit more about it.