Texas Adult Drivers Education Course

The drivers license is the main form of I.D. used here, and they check I.D. a lot; to pay by credit card, buy booze, I was even asked for I.D when I bought a toaster! Plus they have a computer system that registers your driving license and prints you a visitor sticker which is required for entry into the kids schools. Producing a UK driving license or passport for any of these things inevitably causes confusion. It is compulsory to carry your driving license whilst driving, and there's a 90-day grace period for driving with a foreign license, so getting our Texas Drivers License is high up on the to-do list.

In order to get our licenses we have to complete a theory and a practical driving test. For the theory test we signed up for a 6-hour online course. There's no cheating, you have to go through the whole thing, it's timed so that you can't move on to the next page until you have spent what they consider to be long enough on each one, plus they phone you and do a voice recognition exercise every 20 minutes or so. The course is mainly aimed at 16-24 year olds, the most common demographic applying for a drivers license, and it was pretty excruciating. I would say about an hour of it was useful information regarding road rules and signs and the other 5 hours were lectures about speeding, drink driving and general stupidity behind the wheel. It was reminiscent in parts of Harry Enfield's Mr. Cholmondley-Warner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UJPjULCa9Q

Know your limits: here's how to top yourself properly?

Suffice to say, I'm now the proud owner of a "Texas Adult Driver Education Certificate". I just need to get myself a Social Security Number so that I can apply to take the practical test, and try to get my head around the irony of driving myself alone to and from the test if I fail it.