The Cost of Re-Learning How to Drive

Photo credit: Davey Szabó, CC BY 2.0.

Now that Ragtime has closed and all of the snow has finally melted, it’s time for me to re-learn how to drive.

(Whether or not I buy a car is another story — and I’m still leaning heavily towards not — but I should get myself reacquainted with driving regardless. It’s a good life skill to have!)

There are three ways I could remind myself of how driving works:

  1. I could ask my parents to let me practice driving in their car, while one of them sat in the passenger seat and slammed the invisible brake. My folks and I have already agreed that this isn’t the best course of action — they taught me how to drive the first time, and it wasn’t an experience any of us want to repeat — but I should mention it.
  2. I could take adult driving lessons. It looks like I have two options: one local driving school charges $100 for 90 minutes of instruction, and the other charges $50 per hour but suggests that, depending on your past driving experience, you might need to book up to six hours of drive time. Part of me is all “Will I really need six hours? It took me, like, two minutes to re-teach myself how to ride a bike.” The other part is “SAFETY FIRST!”
  3. I could rent a car and take it out on the back roads, which is how I learned how to drive as a teenager. The only difference is that there wouldn’t be anyone in the car with me this time.

I’m really hoping that I’ll get behind the wheel and it’ll all come back to me, moments of gold, flashes of light, etc. But I am not so sure that I’ll automatically remember how to drive that I want to risk the “just rent a car” option — so I sent over an inquiry to the $50/hour driving school to see if they’ll take me as a student. I told them that I had previous driving experience and might only need a couple hours of driving lessons, and we’ll see if that turns out to be an overambitious statement!

Once I get my hour or three behind the driver-school wheel, I’ll try the “rent a car and drive it on my own” thing. After all, I need to re-familiarize myself not only with driving but also with the car rental process if I want my “living in CR without a car” plan to succeed.


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