Day One

I decided that I would take my car (photo at the link) for a decent test drive this morning but it seems that I was destined not to achieve this.
I went down to the car and spent several minutes setting up my GPS and my stereo. I don't seem to have mastered either of these two simple pieces of technology particularly well and I hope to take driving lessons over the next few days so that by the next time I update this, I will be more adept at it.
However, they were not to be my only challenge today. Having set my self up, I went to start the car (and Mandy, you will love this) and the battery was dead as a dodo. After cursing soundly for at least one minute, I decided that the only thing to do was stroll into town and buy some credit on my phone so that I could ring Christopher and hope he was somewhere in the vicinity so that he could come and sort me out. I never got that far because as I was strolling, I found a garage and they rescued me. They took me back to where I was parked, jump started it and I drove back to the garage so they could test the battery. Turns out the battery was the original (i.e. 10 years old) and had chosen this morning to die so $210 (70 pounds) and an hour and a half later, I was mobile again.
I thought that since I had overcome that little problem so well, that I might give this test drive another go. Should have stayed home and done it all tomorrow! As I said, I can't really drive the GPS so I got spectacularly lost before I finally managed to get the silly thing to tell me how to get home. By this time, I had been driving aimlessly around for about 2 hours but I did get home, so all's well that ends well.
I'll have another go tomorrow and let you know how I get on. For today though, I have had enough driving and will walk round to the restaurant where we are going for Joe's birthday dinner.