<Warning, may contain ranting and unreasonable-ness>. OAP's driving slowly whilst wearing hats.

[Mumofaflump]

Seriously? If you cant manage at least 40 mph down a perfectly good A road with a limit of 60 mph then, in my opinion, you shouldn't be driving.

Every morning I get stuck behind at least one person who crawls along at 35mph. Invariably they are driving fast expensive cars too!

Dont even get me started on those who drive fast cars slowly whilst wearing hats..... GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Disclaimer - it is a perfectly good road, 60 is a perfectly sensible speed, conditions permitting.

One of these damn OAPs wrote dh's car off three weeks ago by totally ignoring the roundabout and driving into him whilst he was going along minding his own business

Yes, she was driving a bloody silver Micra too

I was thinking the love cushion, blanket and box of tissues are to give the impression they are still frisky enough to pull in down a quiet country lane?

What is quite worrying is that I will be moving to near where I suspect you live!

My Dad lives there too,and he owns a hat

At least now, I am prepared~thanks...

One day while driving in Iowa I nearly wiped out a whole family of Amish or possibly Hutterites in a minivan and it was their own fault entirely. The driver, wearing a real lace bonnet, stopped at the bottom of the access ramp and was peering backwards, indicator light flashing nicely, maybe looking for a break in the traffic, just as I reached top highway-entering speed right behind her. There was some excellent overtaking and use of the hard shoulder, plus the sort of cursing that is really heartfelt and meaningful and yet doesn't really express all that is in your heart at that exact moment.

My stepdad is 77 , wears a hat, and drives at the speed of light!

(in his Mazda)

FiL is a cunt drives at 12 MPH if someone talks to him. He can't have the radio on and drive at the same time. Nobber.

mathanxiety - not sure about the laws in Iowa, but if you had rear-ended them in the UK that would have been your fault entirely.

My grandad was a fearful driver. He had no real perception of space and I was always worried he'd be scraping paint of cars as he drove by (usually too fast). We all heaved a big sigh of relief when he gave up his licence in his 80's.

Until my dad had a heart bypass and grandad started talking about reapplying for it again

Luckily by then I had passed my test.......

Actually today I reached work so pissed off I could have screamed. Wasn't an old dear, oh no. Just 3 large very slow road maintenance trucks, followed by 2 very large, slow moving tractors (with trailers) for 15 miles. And no room to overtake because they were nose to tail and no places with long enough stretch of road to enable overtaking all of them at once.

This thread has unearthed a memory which was buried deep and happened in 1976.

My Uncle Bob (4 foot six including bunnet) offered to drive me from Cromarty to Inverness in his bubble car.

I had to sit in the back because Aunty Betty always had the front seat despite being very dead and in an urn.....but Uncle Bob said she liked to go for trips out and a picnic......

Anyway, this journey usually took around 40 minutes to the ferry if you took it canny. Uncle Bob certainly took it canny, it took four and three quarter hours to get to the ferry and I think he chanced second gear around Fortrose. Third was ignored completely.

Now having reached Inverness, he realised that he was on a roll so decided to keep going until he got to Dundee. I swear he is the reason that some parts of the A9 were dual carriagewayed. He probably caused a jam from Pitlochry to Inverness.

He said he "never let on" when people honked at him.

GentleOtter - that reminds me about dh's grandad. He used to drive everywhere in third gear. He said the car had a 'very flexible gearbox' but what that actually meant was that it had a totally wrecked gearbox!!

The car screamed, Staying, and God only knows why third gear was ignored - I don't think he realised there was a gear number four, that would have created G force speed and Possible Injury.
I would have been quicker walking in front of him with a flag like they did in 19 oatcake when Uncle Bob was a boy.

oh, yes, 3rd gear!
when Ex's nana stopped driving, the gearbox was really stiff - she'd never gone above 3rd gear!
it took a few trips around the block to ease the gearbox to go above 3rd. After that it ran nicely, but I'm sure it was the beginning of the problems that I had years later with it....
her engine used to scream too!

Oh god yes, third gear! My mum would happily drive everywhere and anywhere without moving from 3rd. She also thinks you have to rev the engine hugely in order to reverse, so parking is a process of loud revving, grinding lurches and slammed-on brakes. Needless to say she can't back into a space unless there's approximately two miles of empty road on either side, and gets extremely stressed when she comes to visit me in the middle of town because 'there's nowhere to park' and people 'park too close'.

Ah yes, my mum doesn't realise her car can go up to fifth. She also thinks that no matter what exit you're taking you should always go round a roundabout in the outside lane.

She also thinks those slip lanes that let you onto a roundabout without needing to give way are dangerous, therefore she uses the wrong approach lane and then veers off at the first exit.

And the parking!!!

Every time I go to see my mother I think she's had to jump out of the car in a tearing hurry, possibly being pursued by monsters or other such nasties.

There is no neat aligning of car parallel to the kerb. It looks like she's just stopped, at a slant, and decided that was good enough.

And she won't reverse into a parking space either. Why would she, when she has all the time in the world to manoeuver carefully into a nice slanted position in a space, thereby removing all possibility of the car next door being accessible other than by the boot?

I once suggested casually that she might like to drop a gear for turning corners. She gave such a scorn-filled look and such a lengthy lecture on her admirable driving skills that I didn't do it again.

Ohh yes, Shodan - the parking style that dh and I call 'Not as much parked as abandoned'. Dh can be very scathing indeed about bad parking, and I have learned to park properly as a consequence. Not that he's horrible to me about it, but it made me want to be able to park well.

StayingDavidTennantsGirl, just as well you didn't post that in Relationships, people would be queuing up to tell you to divorce.

Abandoned- that describes it perfectly, SDTG.

Now we've moved onto parking..... My very good friend lives in Sydney, and one time I went to visit, her Dad brought her to the airport to pick me up. Even after 24+ hours travelling, I was entrusted with parking the car, as he couldn't find a space outside her flat with more than about 3 feet more than he needed. We had to get out and swap seats on a busy road in Bondi, so I could parallel park. It is now always referred to as 'Jenstar's spaced out parking' being better than her Dad's..... I'm fairly sure I would have been over the legal alcohol limit too... (The one and only time I've been over the limit behind the wheel....)

GentleOtter I do love your way with words!

There's a lady round here who once stopped me in the street and asked me to park her very posh car for her as she 'couldn't do it'.

When I was a kid (and we're talking 25 years ago here) I could never understand my dad's complaints about OAPs wearing caps. "Yep, and he's got a flat cap on as well!" he'd say as he finally managed to overtake.

Now I'm older and driving myself, I see exactly what he meant and that it's still going on.

Why do they wear a cap in a car? I just don't get it.

Oh parking .....

A couple of years ago I returned to my car which was in a small local carpark (only holds about 20 cars) only to find a Metro across the entrance and 2 old dears standing next to it.

One of them asked me "Are you a good driver?" (on reflection I should have taken this as my cue, denied knowing how to drive and come back later)

I muttered something vague along the lines that I thought I was fine at driving so she asked me if I could park her car for her "but only if you're very, very careful with it".

She'd been trying to reverse it into a space for ages apparently and couldn't manage it. The space was huge as well as it had a big cross-hatched no parking bit next to it as it was by the ticket machine.

Anyway I got in and parked it which wasn't easy as the ladies kept trying 'to help' by waving me back and getting all agitated if I got too close (ie. 4ft ) from the car in the next space. "Watch out!" "Make sure you've got the right gear" etc

One would be standing right by the front of the car so I'd have to ask her to move so I could swing round into the space, then the other one was standing right behind to make sure that I was aware of the 5 ft brick wall behind me.

Lordy it was hard work!

The thing was unless I'd parked it for them I wouldn't have been able to get my car out of the car park as they were blocking it

Surely, surely the worst are the ones that are in 30 mph zone (everywhere where I live) and drive at 40-50mph except for a corner when they slow down to 2mph and look like they are stirring a bucket of concrete where their gear stick is before accelerating off again.

Oh, and the woman who lives 2 streets away, who reverses her 1000 year old Rover into the road, stops it, gets out, goes back to shut her gate then remembers something in the house and goes back in the house, leaving her car right in the middle of the road, parked...if she hadn't done it right in front of me I'd have come round the corner and collided with a parked car in the main road. I once saw her driving off and my taxi driver said "bloody hell" as she nearly drove straight into us. I do find it amusing that in one of the most heavily populated areas in the South East people still drive as though they will not encounter anyone else on the roads....

In my SIL's village there is a 93 yo man who gets in his car and drives steadily to where he wants to go, doesn't speed up or slow down or take any notice of anyone else on the road, all the locals know his car and drive off the road when they see him coming. Only in Norfolk, says DH. I disagree, when I lived in Devon everyone drove like maniacs no matter what age.