Driving

My job in Spain is a little bit different. Instead of working at the morning camps or teaching English in the evening, I'm the housekeeper, cook, babysitter, CFO, and of course, driver.

I've discovered there are two rules to Spanish driving:

1. Pedestrians always have the right-of-way when stepping onto a cross walk. They won't even look to see if you are coming; they just step right into the street at full speed.

2. Don't turn on red.

Actually, there's a third rule as well, but it relates more to parking than driving:

3. If at least two wheels are inside the parking space, that's good enough. It doesn't seem to matter which two wheels...

Thankfully, I haven't had too many scary moments at the wheel. For the most part, I find Spanish drivers to be the perfect mix of aggressive and law-abiding. Traffic flows really well.

The one mishap I've had though occurred when we were returning to Alcoi from Alicante on Saturday. Our TomTom kept putzing out on us, and we ended up taking about a 15 km detour. I had forgotten to bring my laptop (it had all of my good maps on it), so we spent about 15-20 minutes in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out how to get back home.


Fortunately, we made it and only wasted about 35 minutes.


Here's to two more weeks of accident-free driving.

--EO