Driving Numbers 6 and 7

Apologies for the delay in writing - been trying a new healthy eating plan and it's taken over my mind!!!

There's not much to tell from Week 6 - just an overview of left and right turns and learning to signal the right way and move around the first 3 gears. All of which I think I managed pretty well!

It's last week that the problems began!

Last week was my introduction to reversing. Slightly unnerved by this concept, largely due to the amount of wobbling that occurs when I look behind me when cycling, and I could only conceive that the same would happen if I stopped looking forward in a car. Thankfully this was not the case as the steering wheel is a lot more stable than the handlebars of a bike. Funny that.

So it was not the actually moving that was the problem. It was competent at getting into the right gear, and I was quite capable of moving backwards (or rather the car was) and controlling this movement with the clutch. My problem came in the looking. It seems that part of reversing involves rather a lot of swinging your head round and round looking everywhere. Now I can understand the reasoning of this looking, seeing as though it's always good not to hit things, but would somebody please like to explain this to my body? This swinging head motion produced nothing but a feeling of nausea for me!

I would be deeply grateful to anyone who could relieve me of this nausea. I do indeed get travel/motion sick, but so far in my lessons this has not been a problem. Everyone says that once you're the driver you don't feel sick. Although there was a large part of me that didn't believe this, my experience until this point had proved it.

So now what do I do? Clearly feeling nauseous is not a great way to be in charge of a car. My doctor says they can't give me anything for it because they make you drowsy. My only hope is that the slight infection I had last week was the cause for my increased nausea, not just the head motions. Although I find that moving my head from side to side when not in a car still makes me feel sick to a certain extent! Hmm...

Other problems this week included not being able to tell whether we were coming in at too steep an angle when reversing round a corner. Although how you're supposed to tell this when your movement is very stop starty is beyond me. It became clearer as we moved faster. But all in all, I didn't enjoy this lesson, and am not looking forward to the next!