Never the Easy Way

Somehow the driver's license process is never a smooth and easy road in our family.

Romney was actually pretty excited to get her license, and happily got her learner's permit not long after she turned 15. She started driving right away, and it wasn't long before she was somewhat comfortable driving. But then her crazy school/activity schedule hit and driving got pushed to the back burner. Like the back BACK burner. Her junior year was more insane than her sophomore year, and before we knew it, she was headed into her senior year having not driven in ages and without a license. It was time to get back in the saddle.

Chase had had a miserable experience taking drivers ed through his high school, and I was determined for Romney's experience to be better, so I found a private school. I think it is seriously the same school that my big sister used in 1986. The online lessons were a breeze for Romney. The problem was scheduling the driving time. By the time she was ready to do her driving times with the instructors, she had to retake the written test because it had been so long. Finally we got that taken care of, and then I learned that there are a LOT of people trying to schedule driving times each week. I had to get online every Wednesday at the stroke of 10am and start clicking on the open drive times as fast as I could. It was like trying to catch a fly out of the air. It took a while, but we finally got her three drives in. Yay! Time to take the road test.

Not so fast, there, shooter! I didn't realize that private driving schools can't administer road tests to their own students, please don't ask me why. I do not know. We had to hunt down other driving schools to do it, and you wouldn't believe how long the wait times were! Like, months out. Finally I found one in West Valley but they were only open in the middle of the weekdays. Sigh. So, I pulled Romney out of school, drove forever to get there, and sat in the lobby having a panic attack while she did her road test. I had to do this twice because the first one didn't go so well. Poor thing. She panicked when her instructor told her to "not do anything weird" when a semi truck pulled up behind her. 

Good grief it took forever. But finally FINALLY Romney got her license! Yay! 

Now to get her to start driving on her own. The first day she had her license she was super excited to do this but then had a miserable day of not finding a parking spot, leaving the car several blocks from school so she was quite late, then not being able to find the car after school so I had to come rescue her while Troy called the city to find out if it had been towed. It hadn't. It was just parked farther away than she had thought. So.....not a great start. She is warming up to it again though and I'm just so happy that she has the dang license. And I don't have to think about this again for two years. Or longer, us being us. Who KNOWS when Emma will get hers - when she's 25?