Started PTEC in St. Petersburg, FL

We leave pretty early, around 5 am. Palm Beach blvd to the interstate, we don't start hitting traffic until the Venice area around exit 191, maybe a little before... I'm not very observant lol. What makes it worse is that it's only 4 lanes for quite a while until right before exit 205 when it finally goes to 6 lanes. Anyway, we don't drive super fast anyway, we keep it around 60-65 the whole way, and never have any problem with the traffic. It's interstate the whole way until we hit the exit for the school, and by then it's only a couple of turns and a few minutes to the school, no real traffic. Getting up so early kinda bites, but as long as I go to bed early enough I'm fine

Hubby and I switch off driving. I drive in the morning while he sleeps, and he drives us home in the afternoon. Works well for because after driving those trucks all day I'm beat!! We bring a pillow so we can nap in the car lol. I guess we are getting our 'team' driving training in at the same time haha!!

 

Today they showed us how to parallel park. I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed. I finally got the 90-degree dock parking all by myself today, but that was after many failed attempts and many pull-ups. I hope I can get better. Now the parallel park. I tried it once, with Laura helping me. But I have no idea how I'm going to be able to do it by myself. And after a couple of hours of riding the clutch and twisting the steering wheel this way and that, I feel like someone beat me up! Definitley needed to be in better shape for this class lol.

But on the bright side, Al evaluated our clutching today - upshifting, downshifting and skip shifting - and he told me he was very impressed with my clutching ablities woo hoo!

JP bummer news about the funding have you looked into WIA I think it's called? Workforce Investment Act or something like that... I would hate for you not to be able to go...

 

Today was the last day of week 3 and we went out into the real world for the first time. City driving woo hoo!! Al took us 3 of us out before lunch and the other 2 after lunch. I didn't realize how close we were to downtown and that Tropicana bowl stadium (football? baseball?). I'm happy to report no pedestrians or curbs were ran over haha.

In the morning before we did our pre-trips Al and Laura taught us offset backing. Which is the last of the parking manuevers. So from now on it will be practice practice practice.

 

Lantern, I do find myself thinking a lot... I set myself up, and before I do anything, I sit there for a few seconds and think about what I'm going to do... then about half way through I usually stop and think again, LOL and of course anytime I pull up I stop and think before I go again... maybe I'm thinking too much! I'll have to try your advice and see what happens

 

I should explain better, when we got to drive out in the real world today it was all downtown St Petersburg driving. Never really went above 8th gear as there was always a traffic light to stop at. Or if not stopping completely, at least slowing down enough to make the turn. We did mostly all right turns with a few left turns. There were pedestrians and bicyclists and railroad tracks and low hanging trees and of course curbs to watch out for. Having to think about what gear you are in, what gear do you want next, don't shift during a turn, hold both hands on the steering wheel, hug the left lane, turn your signal on, cancel your signal when done, when to start your turn so your trailer tires are no more then 3 feet from the curb... it was awesome, I can't wait to do it again. Since there were 3 of us and we only had about an hour and a half we each only drove for a total of 2 miles each. But we will have 1000 miles before we graduate