D​RIVER'S BEGINNINGS: ENTRY TWO

i​'m going to make a little confession; i actually thought driving would be as easy as it is on a computer.

i​ was so, so, so wrong.

t​he biggest change for me (quite apart from the fact that all steering wheels you buy for gaming have the gear lever to the left - which isn't true in a right hand drive car) is the amount you have to steer. in many games, you only need to turn 90° in either direction for full lock. it's not like that in real life. but enough about the wishful picture i've been paiting from games. it'd been 3 weeks driving round and round in a parking lot, after which i finally got to the public roads of australia. but 6 minutes later, i wished i hadn't. it's not so much that i was scared to mess up, but more to do with people seeing me mess up. i haven't driven to school for that reason - the fear of stuffing my parking outside the gates and seeing it on instagram that evening, with about 50 comments from people who all appear to be driving experts. no matter, my first public drive went well, and with each minute on the road, i became more comfortable with it all. honestly though, i'm starting to wonder whether games will be the leading cause for single-vehicle accidents in the future.

a​nother thing that's really important (or so i'm told) is the insurance paperwork. since i'm not terribly fond of that, i leave it to my parents, who discover it's not really possible to insure a 1-month old driver as the owner of a car. shame. guess i'll just be driving on their insurance then. the other thing i need to sort out is my licensing future. with the way queensland hands out licenses, i can see the demise of the manual gearbox painted out in front of me. to put it simply, if you take the practical test with a manual transmission, you are permitted to drive both manual and automatic cars. but if you choose to turn up to the licensing centre in an automatic vehicle, you'll only be driving autos for the next year, until you can do a re-test. this means you'll have to arrange for a manual car, and being the world we live in today, it's very wearisome to try. but i'll do my best.

so i had to ask a family member who lives in another state if i could borrow theirs (as they have the only three-pedaled car in my entire extended family). natuarally, the problems didn't stop there. due to the unique way our governments work, queensland and new south wales share a border that isn't quite a border, but is more than one. let me explain as briefly as possible. the border around the tweed heads area is crossed all the time, as people go about their daily lives, working on the queensland side and coming home to their house in new south wales. however, due to the recent spike in COVID-19 cases in sydney, the queensland premier announced that the border would be shut completely, only allowing a select group of people to travel through. it's a whole political thing but for me, it basically means i can't possibly get a NSW-registered car into queensland like this.

so that's where i'm at. i'd love to know how the licensing system works in your country, or if you have any tips on how to deal with this because i have pretty much no clue. anyways thanks for reading what is essentially a complaint letter on how politics has stuffed up my driver's ed.