New habits die hard

Some time ago I wrote about[^] learning to cross the road when the traffic drives on the 'wrong' side. Having lived 48 years (and crossing roads for 45 of those years) in a place where they drive on the left it was quite the challenge to live in a place where they drive on the right.

In a later post I mentioned that my wife wanted a count of how many times I went to the wrong side of the car[^]. At the time I wrote that post I'd been back in Godzone[^] all of three days but hadn't made the mistake.

I'm coming up to my third anniversary of living in the US (it's November 17th if you're wondering). For about half of that time I've had my own car and maybe for half of the time I've had the car I've actually been here in Phoenix to drive. So you might imagine, given all those halves of halves, that a mere 9 months or so of driving on the 'wrong' side might not be quite enough to engender new habits that are hard to break. I'd have thought so.

So a couple of weeks ago, back in Australia, I was having dinner with an old friend. We ate at a very nice Thai Restaurant in Frankston and, because I had a hired car, we decided that I'd drive. Dinner done we emerged into Melbourne weather at the end of September. Quite the thunderstorm and a deluge of rain. We scurried to the car but she needed some smokes so I followed instructions (Frankston is far enough away from where I used to live that I have no idea of the layout of the suburb) to the local supermarket. We went inside, got the smokes and emerged just as a fresh deluge fell out of the night sky. And so we scurried back to the car. And I went toward the left of the car. She laughed and laughed and I made her promise she wouldn't say a word.

Later that evening I was driving back to Heino's. The car was just about out of petrol so I pulled in to a servo, filled it up and went to pay. Having paid I came back out and got into the car again. Say what? Where's the steering wheel? Doh! It's over there on the right. Uh huh. I'd got into the passenger side.

New habits die hard!