A wide berth
Step 1 of the medical licensing exam is in the books. Next step – car shopping in Boston!
I decided to shave my exam-induced Yeti-face and dress up to look like a respectable citizen before test-driving some cars. For good measure, I brought along some of my joke-y business cards to hand to the salesman to sustain the illusion of respectability. It worked. The dude handed me some keys and told me to come get him when I got back. An independent test-drive? Success!
Getting back behind the wheel of a car really puts a different perspective on cycling. In particular – there are a LOT of cyclists in Boston! While at a stop light, I had to suppress the urge to applaud a mini bike train traveling towards Harvard on North Harvard Ave. I guess that I’ve never see that many cyclists on a commute since I’m going more or less the same speed and direction that everyone else is going, limiting my observation to the back of one or two butts per commute. In the borrowed Subaru Legacy, things were different.
I felt extremely self-conscious passing cyclists in the car, mostly because I didn’t want to kill them. On a bike, I give someone a nice little cough warning and off I go. It dawned on me while driving that a driver isn’t symmetrically positioned in the car – you kind of have to estimate that the mirror isn’t going to bash the cyclist on your right. Of course, I gave everyone a wide berth while passing, leading to some line-weaving that a car salesman probably wouldn’t have liked so much. On the bright side, I can inform the world that a Subaru Legacy handles like a dream. You heard it here first.
Moral of the story? Dress natty, get car.
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