Basically just boasting

[davidn]

After the two-hour wait for the registry and the final cleanup (where I think they were understaffed - our salesman came past apologizing for the wait, with oil on his shirt and a power screwdriver in his hand), we finally got to take the car home. When we got in, more than ready to have dinner, we found that the chicken that we had in the fridge for our planned dinner had gone off... and then realized that instead of improvising something else, we could now just scoot down to the supermarket and back in about ten minutes, without it being an hour-long planned excursion while wrestling a granny-cart along with us. It was like a huge revelation - is this how normal people live? I hadn't realized the amount of flexibility that I'd been missing since living in Scotland, just in owning a vehicle - I can't wait to go around to see someone back in Brookline (for which the MBTA's site estimates about an hour and a half) and say yes, we'll be there in fifteen minutes.

I've been doing some light reading in the form of the navigation manual (150 pages) and the owner's manual (330 pages), just working out what we can do with it. I've never regularly driven a car that was put together after about 1995 before, so most of the available array of controls except the steering wheel are new to me - like central locking, cruise control and something called "RES ACCEL" that I think might fire rockets. One of my concerns about the navigation system was its ability to understand me - even other humans sometimes have difficulty with that, but on a few test routes, it didn't pick up the name of the destination any worse than I feel it would have for anyone else. We've already been arguing with it in terms of what route to actually take - on the main road rather than through a maze of residential streets - and the speed at which it recalculates the route when you stray from it is very impressive.

In general we've been just getting used to the existence of our newfound transportation - I drove Whitney to work this morning, though we don't plan to use it to replace that walk often, and for my last day at the office I rode the bus of irony one last time because I didn't really want to deal with parking, or the inner city traffic, at this point. We've already had a folding table in the back - with the back seats down flat, it's suddenly like we've rented a van. I'm sure that I'll get used to driving again, even though in America it seems that you need to be a lot more alert in general - here, everything is the Forfar Road roundabout(s).

Comments

[shoe--gal.livejournal.com]

That's funny, because I think after driving (well, being a passenger!) in the US, I'm now *more* convinced that roundabouts are a good thing. I dislike the stop/start driving that we get here, where you're always having to stop at a 4-way stop or a traffic light, and in some of those instances a roundabout would help keep traffic flowing better, saving fuel too.

Congrats on getting the car though, I'm very jealous! We don't have one here and just rent occasionally and I really miss the flexibility of just being able to get up and go where I want.

[davidn]

Ah, yes, within the towns they make more sense - peppered on the roads between major cities, not as much! The crossroads here still make me nervous, particularly if I don't have a STOP sign... I feel that Britain had a better distinction between who had right of way and who didn't, and I'm always convinced that if I carry on going someone's going to zoom across the junction and get me anyway.