Just a month back, I celebrated passing my driver’s licence test. What an awesome feeling it was when my husband said “Congratulations!, Now you are a licenced driver”. And from that day it self, I was dreaming of driving on the Mumbai-Pune express-way.

Practice makes a man perfect and therefore one should keep practicing at every opportunity. A week after that, I was returning from Pune to Mumbai with my family, and I decided to share driving time. Great! Express-way driving!

We started our journey from downtown Pune. City driving was not that hard. Shortly, I had a very embrassing moment when my car stalled at a signal. I was not able to start the car. For three green signals, we were at the same stop. Fourth already stared when I realized car was on 2nd gear and I was on an incline. Finally crossed the signal. Later after crossing Chandani Chowk, highway driving started!

My heartbeats were going faster, as I was switching the gears…3rd, 4th, fast 5th. I was trying to go slow, but Alok said, “This is highway and to be safe you have to go with the speed of traffic. So your speed range is 60-100 km/hr”. Oh my god! I never crossed 40 and now I have to go with this vroom vrooom.

I just can’t forget that moment when it was 5th gear and my speed? I just had a quick look at speedometer… Woha! 110 km/hr! Mixed feelings of excitement and slight fear. I slowed down a bit again.

Being at the fast speed of traffic to be safe – that was a new lesson for me. It goes against the “slow and steady” approach advocated by the hare-and-tortoise story. Well, I’ll be the fast hare on some occassions; albeit the one that doesn’t sleep :-P