Driving test, take two

I was going to bore you with a long description of how the test and the lesson before it went, but I don't think I'll bother.

I'll just tell you I passed.

I was still crunching the gears every now and then before the test, but not enough that it was making me nervous. I had the same examiner for this test, so I knew what to expect there. One less unknown to worry about.

For the first eighty percent of the test I was going really well, my gear changes were just about perfect. The latter part of it there were a few crunches, but not quite enough to fail me.

The one time where I thought I may have failed was going up a steep hill. I was like the little engine that could. We were in seventh gear, the revs were dropping and I was thinking I should change down to sixth, then the hill leveled out a bit. I though, beauty, we're accelerating, I don't need to change yet.

Then we rounded a bend and it got really steep. I got it into sixth, but because we lost so much momentum I was already too slow and had to go for fifth. There was no way it was going to pull in fifth on that steep a hill from that speed, so I stopped and demonstrated my hill start instead.

Col admitted afterward that he wanted to tell me to change down because he knew it was going to get steeper, but if he had it would have been an instant fail.

So, now my license has a purple border around it instead of a yellow one. I think it looks better that colour.