Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Going Solo


So over the weekend when we were down on the farm between one of the rides up and down the driveway Ginger and I had a conversation about Quinn driving the golf cart. It went something like this:

JamesF: "He's doing pretty good. Still has some problems turning, but otherwise not too bad. He really wants to try it by himself though."

Ginger: "No."

JamesF: "No?"

Ginger: "No."

JamesF: "Why ..."

Ginger: "Because he's only seven."

JamesF: "not? Ok, I can see that, but..."

Ginger: "Only. Seven."

So of course that resulted in the following a couple rides later:


Quinn was suppose to stop and pick me up since I had planned on keeping it somewhat on the down low until I was more confident in how he was doing. But noooo, he keeps on driving so we got busted pretty quick. Now I will admit that first time I let him go solo I was a tad worried myself since I kept envisioning all the stuff that could go wrong, and once he was moving by himself I could totally see where Ginger was coming from and even briefly regretted my decision. But I had him pointed in the right direction and had run down the lane to supervise him and he did fine (as is evidenced in the video). Luckily he eventually stopped since I was a bit worried about him turning around in the area where people were parked. After that I always made sure I was there when he was turning in the parking area since one time he kept gunning the gas instead of hitting the brake and could have potentially run into Jo Beth's new car had I not stopped him.

I tried to get Catherine to drive the golf cart but she simply wouldn't have any of it and was content to merely be a passenger. That meant there were three of us on the cart when she was riding since while I was confident in letting Quinn ride by himself (feeling if he got a bit injured he would be fine and it would teach him a lesson or two), but I was nowhere near comfortable enough with him driving to let him drive it with Catherine as a passenger and no adult supervision. I felt I needed to make sure Catherine didn't fall off the side. On top of that I needed to be in the middle to be able to hit the brake if necessary. All this made riding awkward as I had to sit in the middle with an arm around Catherine.

4 comments:

Barry said...

wow. there were some pretty big trees not far from the path.

Anonymous said...

hasn't he driven the plethora of vehicles in Perry's basement?

JamesF said...

dashrb: hasn't he driven the plethora of vehicles in Perry's basement?

There's a bit of a difference in driving something inside that moves at about three mph versus a golf cart outside which is much more difficult to steer and goes faster than I can run.

About the closest he's come before this was driving a go-kart down at the beach, but even then you're limited to where you can go and there's no danger of running off the track and running into a tree.

gaz said...

dude - while that is a cool video... it could have gone sooo horribly wrong.
your next post could have been of quinn in traction!! :-]