by Karen Seaboyer
I owned my first car for a month before I drove it to work.
Jackson Yellowe the Wonderbug was the most exciting toy I’d bought myself and yet I couldn’t play with it. Friends offered to teach me to drive a gearshift, but it was autumn and dark on weeknights. We toodled around on weekends, doing circles in the UBC Thunderbird Stadium parking lot. Then changing direction.
One Saturday afternoon was spent driving back and forth in a vast, barren parking lot that was used for Cirque du Soleil’s tent village in later years. But this time it was used for my humiliating attempts at driving my bright yellow car (not easily camouflaged) without stalling it – and maybe even going fast enough to change gears.
The loitering teenagers hanging out on the sidelines saw me bunny-hopping across the lot and restarting the car every 20 seconds when I stalled it. (That clutch was a real menace.) They shouted out “Wanna drag race?!” just to instill more confidence.
Eventually I got the hang of it, but was told, “When you learn to drive this, you’ll be able to drive ANYTHING.”
November 13, 2016 at 2:13 pm
Ah! I love the bunny hop! Its a rite of passage I believe… as embarrassing as it is – nothing makes me smile more than seeing someone else bunny hop in a bug… I miss the days I did it…hahaha…
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October 16, 2016 at 11:48 pm
I agree! I learned how to drive a stick shift in my Triumph Spitfire, when I was 21. I messed my knee up in stop-go traffic crossing the huge bridge in New Orleans in 5 o’clock traffic one day. Clutches are hard on knees sometimes. I have an automatic transmission Beetle now, so there’s no problem.
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October 17, 2016 at 4:14 am
I can’t even imagine learning to drive in the first place with a stick shift and city traffic. Good for you for taking it on! It would be way more than my knee that got messed up if I were doing that! PS – I love New Orleans.
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October 17, 2016 at 6:47 am
I was there from 1973-82. It was a great place to be.
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