Driving with Star.

And I, I took the road less traveled by.  I was using a GPS system.  ~Robert Brault

If you want to know how badly the education system fails our kids just try teaching a kinesthetic learner how to drive a car.  The point is moot if you yourself are a kinesthetic learner.  I'm telling you it is an experience never to be forgotten ~ & if one can help it never, absolutely never, to be repeated! 

Liddy is a kinesthetic.  She treated the car as an extension of herself.  Where she looked, there the car went!  It was hairy.  Ask her little sister.  On pain of having to exercise their legs her passengers were barred from commenting ~ which meant a lot of gurgling noises from the back seat where Star was manfully restraining herself. 

Naturally Liddy was anticipating her revenge when said little sister began to drive herself.  What she failed to take into account is that Star is not a kinesthetic learner.  Star, like her mama, is a visual learner.  Star has never once aimed the car at some unfortunate pedestrian & gunned the motor.  She transitioned smoothly from passenger to driver with only the occasional blond moment when the car has stalled or she has forgotten ignition is necessary to movement.

Just the same I was leery of letting her loose on the main roads on the mainland.  None of my children are reknowned for following instructions obediently & I am tired of hearing, "Chill, mother," after yet another incident guarenteed to add more grey to my rapidly greying locks! Unfortunately there is only one way to learn to drive a car & that is to get behind the wheel & do it!

 Star has been pottering around the island more than compently for the past few months so I let her loose on the mainland car.  The mainland car does not have power steering.  It really needs to be manhandled around corners & round~a~bouts, objects strenously to rapid acceleration & has gears more widely spaced than Star has grown used to.  In & out to singing & Star was doing very well indeed.  So well in fact, I took a risk.  I drove in to town on Sunday because Star's parking is dodgy & I wasn't about to risk it in the middle of Brisbane but coming out was another matter entirely.  Traffic was light so I passed Star the keys. 

Star, as the youngest & most indulged of a long, long tail has the sort of shattering self~confidence that sank the Titanic. She promptly negotiated herself out of the QPAC parking & into the outward flow of Brisbane traffic with nary a quibble.  She has travelled this route so often [& had to navigate me] she needed no direction.  We had one little wobble where the lanes squirm all over the road as they condense from 5 lanes to just one but with no other cars around it didn't matter & she will remember another time.  I was very pleased.  Until.

Until we pulled up at the jetty.  Star mamothly misjudged the curb & hit it with a resounding bang!  Indeed she hit it so hard she popped my hub~cap & broke it. *sigh* A little more practise on the essential things needed it seems.