History Adventuring

Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...

I saw a car today that said "Student Driver" on it, and it's made me want to time-travel a bit. Whether it's the distant future, or not so far away, student drivers as we know them, will end. Cars will become automated, the same way that elevators did, and so many other things that we take for granted that don't require a human being to operate them. Speaking for myself, I was proud of the things that I started learning at age 16 that allowed me to operate an automobile. By the time that I was a student driver cars had gotten much easier to operate than in my grandpappy's time, with automatic transmissions, power steering, that kind of thing. Still, it took some skill to learn how to turn the steering wheel, apply the brakes, etc. so that you didn't bump (or crash!) into things. I prided myself on learning to come to such a smooth stop while driving my parents' Torino station wagon that it felt as soft as drifting into a cloud. Of course, when I first ...