🚙 Drive Time
My sons are getting closer to taking their final driving tests to get their licenses and asked me to take them out for a more technical drive after work. I'm not entirely sure if that's what they were looking for, but that translated to working on parking technique to me and I knew just the spot.
Of course the first task was putting the pups down for a nap in their crate because Mary and the girls were away on one of their weekly activities. Thankfully the pups have been doing great in their crate lately because they are nowhere near ready to be left to roam unattended in our house for an hour right now. I went in expecting the worst, but we'd specifically delayed their usual nap time and thankfully they settled right down.
The second task was to pull my own car out of the garage and park along the curb in front of our yard so that we could do a parallel park at the end of each drive. Once that was settled we were ready to hit the road and get on with the parking techniques I figured they needed to improve.
My idea for working on parking was to head over to a little parking lot at a nearby elementary school and just focus on parking smoothly and centered within the lines. Of course there was also a lot of post first attempt correction as well which is its own fairly unintuitive skill. Between the two of them we did a lot of evaluating, backing up, adjusting, and correcting. Ultimately, I think it was pretty worthwhile, but I'd like to do it again in another week or so and hopefully confirm some retention and improvement.
We finished up both of their drives with some parallel parking attempts and I mostly wanted them to just follow the method as they've been instructed. It mostly worked, but seemed to require more space than you often get in the real world. I also noticed that they needed to get closer to my car when lining up for the process. I gave them a few pointers on how my approach has evolved after 35 years of driving and differed from what they were doing. I wouldn't say I'm an expert and always get it right on the first try, but I'm fairly comfortable getting into tight parallel parking spots and correcting when the first attempt isn't right. I had my younger son try something similar to my approach and he was able to get much closer to my parked car in the process. So we'll see how both of them do the next time around.
Best of all once we finished and parked the cars we found the pups still quietly resting in their crate. We immediately took them out to the backyard for a quick potty break and some play time. Of course one of them did his business outside where he was supposed to and the other waited and immediately peed on our tv room floor when we came back into the house 15 minutes later.🤷🏻♂️