Round and around
This last weekend I spent five hours on the motorbikes. Egads.
Well, not counting time spend traveling to and from the course, of course. That adds at least another couple of hours, what with having moved a bit further away.
Saturday’s instructor was…not very good. This wasn’t a big deal for the first hour of instruction, which was on a motorcycle simulator, featuring the World’s Least-Attentive People. It was basically impossible to not crash your bike in this simulated town, what with everyone leaping out in front of you every chance they got. A good laugh was had by all.
He spent the first actual hour on the bikes doing this odd skill where the instructor waves colored flags, and depending on what color flag he’s waving, you’re supposed to swerve to the left or to the right, or keep going straight, while you’re doing an emergency stop. This is apparently to teach you how to decide which way to go in a real emergency-stop kind of situation, even though in such a situation, people are rarely going to be helpfully waving colored flags to tell you which way to go to not hit something.
His second hour, he was supposed to teach us how to do the odd ladder-thing, where you ride your bike along a succession of beams placed in the way. You’re supposed to stand on the pegs to give you a bit more of a cushion against the bouncing. He gave us a token bit of instruction on this, and then said “Follow me!” while he showed off doing trials-type things that he knew damn well nobody had the skill to even begin to attempt. Bad teacher, no donut.
On Sunday, though, I got my favorite instructor at the school—a guy named Noda, who is a complete motorcycle nerd, and wants everyone to be just as good with motorbikes as he was. He went through all of the difficult skills with me over and over until I could do them perfectly, and then went through both of the test courses with me until I could do them without any hesitation. And then he went over the skills with me again. I felt like I was twice as skilled after spending a couple of hours under his tutelage as I was before. It was quite a nice feeling.
The actual test was this morning at 9:30am. They had us show up at 8:30 to take care of paperwork—it turns out there were five of us taking the riding test.
I was first. I passed it effortlessly thanks in no small part to Mr. Noda’s teaching—which might have been a bad thing for the guys after me, because I think I made it look too easy. The guy right after me lost his balance on the riding-down-the-ladder skill, and the guy right after him went around really slowly and was lectured about it. We were the three large-motorcycle test takers.
There were also two younger guys who were going for their restricted license—the one I already have. The first one who went out actually fell over on the first left turn, and never quite recovered his composure after that. The second one, though, passed it without making much of an effort—I’d already advised him that he should trust his bike, and drive with self-confidence. If he’d had Mr. Noda as a teacher, though, he probably already understood that.
Unfortunately all the rest of the paperwork left me with not enough time to actually go to the license center and pick up the license—so I guess that’s an adventure for another day.