If only the test was today

I had another driving lesson today.

The difference between today and two weeks ago was incredible. I crunched the gears a few times, but nowhere near as much as I have before. I had a different truck today and a different instructor, Alan, but I think it was more a case of me just being more in tune with the truck.

It certainly increased my confidence a heap. If I'd gone for the test today, I would have gone in there confident that I could pass, whereas last time I fully expected to fail.

I've had a lot of hits on the blog lately searching for information on driving with the Roadranger gearbox, so I'm going to try to make this as helpful as possible.

The main problem I was having was not getting the revs right when I was changing down. There's about 400 RPM difference between each gear. If you rev the engine so that it goes up by 400 RPM when you change gear you'll get it in every time. It's not really a case of watching the tacho everytime you change gears though, like I was doing before. You have to listen for it, after a while you'll know when it's right and when it isn't.

I'm also starting to treat it more like a truck than a car, in that I'm giving myself a lot more time to slow down coming up to turns and such. I still think coming almost to a complete stop in fifth gear without touching the clutch, then pulling away smoothly is pretty cool. There's no way you'd be able to do that in any car I've ever driven.

Anyway, my test is booked for the 11th of January, in the morning and I've got a two hour lesson on the Saturday before that. We're getting air conditioning installed on the Thursday before, so I hope it's not too hard to get out of bed on the Saturday.

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I mentioned the other day that I'd submitted some photos to Shutterstock, with a view to selling them. Most of them were rejected because of noise or grain. I can't make another submission for 30 days, so I've cleaned up the grain on some of them and submitted them to Fotalia, another library.

I think the idea of making me wait 30 days is quite a good one actually. That way I'm not going to rush out and take a load of rubbish photos and have another failure. It forces me to take my time. I've already got some good ideas for my next submission.