transport: cars

When I was a kid I thought that hills in the road were made by construction workers stacking up building blocks and then paving over them.

I used to believe that every time I saw a stretched limo it was either 1. Madonna (or) 2. Michael Jackson. Apparently those were the only celebrities in my world.

I used to believe that cars were like rollercoasters. There was a track that the cars were on and it pulled the cars along. The steering wheel was there to change "tracks." And the speed limits signs were really just telling you how fast you were going on that particular road.

I used to think that after you passed an off-ramp while driving on the freeeway, it disappeared.

I used to think that if a parking spot had a wheelchair on it, it was for employees only.

Growing up, I knew there was some BIG secret that adults kept from kids. I convinced myself that this secret was how they could drive without ever blinking. Driving seemed like such a big responsibility I did not think you could afford to stop looking at the road for an instant or you'd die. I even watched my parents when they drove and somehow I never saw them blink. I thought this was the great secret of the universe and couldn't wait to find out how they did it.

The written abbreviation "4WD," which is often found written on the outsides of big jeeps and pickup trucks, in truth means "four wheel drive." I used to believe that it meant "forward," a sort of advertising slogan indicating that anyone who used the car would be able to go forward.

When we are young we don't understand how many things work. I thought cars were operated by magnetic strips under the road like on a toy car track. I was very confused on how the car knew where to go.

I used to believe that cars were super intelligent and always knew which way my parents were going to turn and set the blinkers on the correct side for them.

We didn't have a car when I was a child, hardly anyone did. When an Uncle took my Dad & I to Butlin's for our holidays, I saw a sign that said, 'Dual Carriageway Ahead'
After driving on for ages, I just couldn't understand why I had not seen this village called 'Dual Carriageway'!

I thought that the reason there was glass over the instrument panel (battery gauge, fuel, etc.) to prevent people from manually grabbing the speedometer needle and jamming it well over 100 mph - because accelerating that quickly was almost certainly illegal.

I thought that to make a car go faster, you spun the wheel faster - clockwise to go forwards, counter to go backwards. You pushed the right or left pedal to turn.

When I was 7, our family was riding home from a trip. It was nighttime I was awake keeping my dad company and I noticed that the car lights would go dim and bright. I asked my dad how that happened. He told me that there was a button on the bottom of his left foot that he pressed down on the floorboard when he wanted to change the lights. The next night when mom and dad were watching TV in bed, I asked my dad to let me see his foot so I could find that button and had wondered when that button would grow on my left foot.

When I was younger I heard my parents talking about our car and they said that the engine was doing backflips, and that it wouldn't turn over. For years I believed that the engine was actually doing Backflips and that it was supposed to turn over. I now know I was wrong(:

Up until I was about 10, in my mom's car as she was backing up out of our driveway, I never noticed she used the handle to put the car in reverse. I always thought the car knew what she was thinking, and she would think "go backwards" and the car would.

When I was about 4 I heard my mom make the comment, "well I guess that they ran out of blinker fluid". It wasn't until I got my driver's permit that I realized that there was no such thing as blinker fluid.