Marco?

Polo! Well, Polo was the name of the wee car I hired this past weekend when my friend Brandon came to visit from Edinburgh. Finally, I was able to drive a manual car in the UK completely on my own. In Canada, driving a manual (aka standard) car is pretty uncommon. Most people drive automatics while in the UK pretty much everyone drives a manual car. Apparently, automatics are considered "old people's cars" - who knew???

I successfully drove around in my wee Polo for 3 whole days. Well, "success" is a relative term I suppose. It didn't start off so well - I couldn't figure out how to shift the car into reverse. The "R" for reverse was next to the "1" for Gear 1, but for some reason I couldn't get the gear shift to, um, shift to that position. Brandon didn't know either . . . luckily we had yet to leave the car park of the car hire place, so I went inside and did the dumb blond routine. We then discovered that the only way to get the gear shift into the reverse position was to press down on the gear shift first and then push it to the left. Oh, technology, how you mock me.

Upon finally leaving the car dealership, I managed to stall on the very first roundabout we came to (about 30 m from the dealership). It was the first of many stalls over our weekend together. Poor Brandon was a bit of a guinea pig for my driving abilities! I think he'd get back into a car with me, but maybe not for a while . . .

So, success wise . . . well, the good news is that no one was killed or injured in the driving of this vehicle.