Zoe – Penicuik Midlothian
Zoe got in touch just before the summer holidays, she was looking for a driving instructor in the Penicuik area to begin driving lessons with. On our first driving lesson, we headed just outside Penicuik to the moor road which leads to West Linton. On this road, I quickly explained the basics and we started by starting and stopping the car. Zoe did really well and before we knew it we were changing gear and stopping in different passing places as we went. After driving along towards West Linton we turned and looped back to Penicuik. For a first driving lesson, Zoe had managed to do a lot, changing through lots of gears, driving at a range of speeds and going in and out of junctions.
In our second lesson, we really built on the control skills and selected a loop in Penicuik that involved an uphill junction and a downhill junction. This really advanced Zoe’s control. I really feel that once this is consistent that the rest of the driving starts to fall into place.
Living in Penicuik there are a number of places you could go to sit the driving test. We discussed that the Currie test centre in Edinburgh was probably going to be the best for us. It was close, full time and I was very familiar with the area.
As the weeks went by Zoe progressed steadily, we drove in and out of Edinburgh from Penicuik regularly, this had a number of features like fast A roads, the city of Edinburgh bypass and a huge range of roundabouts. As the summer went by Zoe’s skills were getting more and more consistent, we were fast moving towards trying a mock driving test to see what Zoe would be like under slight pressure.
At the end of Summer, Zoe started university at Queen Margaret University, this was very exciting and also a massive motivation to see if we could bring the driving together soon, as the journey from Penicuik to university took a long time by bus. After completing our mock driving test we managed to get a driving test booked for a few weeks away. The timing sounded perfect, it was far enough away we could sort out the final details, but close enough to keep the excitement up.
We started early on the day of the driving test leaving Penicuik as the sun started to come up, Zoe was understandably nervous but I was very confident that she had done everything that she needed to in practice.
Arriving at the test centre we walked into the waiting room and awaited for Zoe to be called by the examiner, when she was called I wished her luck and then waited for her to return. I was thrilled to find out on her return that she had passed her driving test on her first attempt. Zoe is now free to come and go from Penicuik as much as she likes. Well done.
