> He did pretty good though he did have a tendancy to veer to the left a bit.

Looking back on when I learned to drive, I did something I can't imagine how anybody could tolerate, including myself. The hardest thing I had to learn was not really so much anything to do with the rules of the road but how to gauge where the car is within a lane. Try as I might, the angled, off-center perspective a driver has of the road from the driver's seat really messed me up, and I just could not tell how centered the car was within a lane of traffic. I didn't really have the sense that the lane was over twice as wide as the car, which it usually was, so I felt like there was such a narrow range of what would be correct positioning within the lane.

The result of all this was that I was constantly correcting my position in the lane -- or, more accurately, overcorrecting my position in the lane. So I'd angle left, then realize that was too far, then angle right, then realize that was too far, then angle left again. So there I go down the road, oscillating the steering wheel back and forth, sometimes pretty rapidly. If I do this now, on purpose, repeating the exact same motions I remember, the car lurches back and forth pretty uncomfortably, but I either couldn't tell at the time because I was too focused on driving, or it wasn't as bad as I remember. I think it was the former, though, and my parents were exceptionally understanding about it.

The weird thing is, I couldn't stop doing that at first. I remember my mother saying one time to try to keep the wheel steadier. So I tried moving the wheel as little as possible, straightening myself out, but my internal gauge of how the car was doing within the lane hadn't improved, so I'd drift dangerously close (dangerously close probably only in my head) to one side of the lane, then try to correct the error as minimally as possible, which would result in drifting over to the other side more slowly but just as surely.

Short story long, that was the toughest part of learning to drive, and it's not really what I would have expected to be the primary challenge.

S "this learning-to-drive story brought to you by" am