Cool Car Tales - 7th Trip, hold onto your hats!

Hey Peeps!  Since I am blogging at Mom's Time Out Twin Cities through the end of this week the lovely Michelle is taking the wheel today...you may want to buckle up!  And please visit her (and ALL my guest bloggers) blogs.  I picked these PEEPS for a reason Yo!  They can make totally idiots of themselves for my enjoyment tell great stories!  ;)

Hi All, my name is Michelle and you can find me screwing up being a lunatic writing daily over at So Wonderful, So Marvelous.  I hope you'll pop over to say hello.  I am so excited that Lisa, who I think has the best tag line of any blog ever,  invited me over here to make an ass out of myself in front of her readers. An ass, you say? Allow me to illustrate as I share the story of my first driving "incident" with you.

When I was fifteen, my step-mom Colleen drove a sweet Toyota Celica.  It was cherry red and had a black car bra... use your imagination that this was 1991 and the height of cool... now, notsomuch.  She also, I am sure in an attempt to aid the hormonal teen / new step-mom relationship that admittedly was a bit rocky, would let me drive it.  Carefully.  Supervised.  In a parking lot with zero cars near our house... without a license.  You can imagine how freaking awesome this made me {at least in my mind} to be driving this car at fifteen. 

My dad at the time, was working out of town a lot, often for a few weeks at a time.  Colleen decided that we were going to take a road trip to Louisville, Kentucky to see him.  She packed up me, my sister Lyndsey, my baby sister Elise, and my two little cousins in her little red Celica and off we went.  My Aunt Kathy and my two toddler cousins were going to drive up from Atlanta and meet us there for vacation.

Now, I should tell you that we arrived safely at the Holiday Inn some time mid-afternoon and we were all ready to be out of the car.  Colleen ran in to the lobby to get us checked in and came back with the keys... yes, actual keys!  While she was in the lobby, Elise had filled her diaper and the car with an awful smell so it was rather urgent that we get to our room quickly.  I begged and pleaded for her to let me drive from the lobby around back to our room, which was, I'm guessing about 200 feet?  The rooms in the back building had doors to the outside, with a few short steps up from the sidewalk.

She said yes and off we went.  We get near to our room and I needed to turn into a parking space. 

Wait!  For what happened next to make sense I have to tell you something else.  My mom had also been teaching me to drive a stick shift.  So I often forgot that I didn't need both feet to drive Colleen's car which was an automatic.  I almost always forgot and had one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake.

I go to turn into the parking spot and I have my arms crossed on the steering wheel, my left hand is at about two o'clock and my right is crossed over it at about nine o'clock... like this was going to be some major turn or I was going to start doing donuts in the parking lot.  It had to have looked hilarious from the passenger seat and {mid turn} Colleen asks me what the heck I am doing.  My concentration broke and mostly already into the parking space, I slam on the breaks.

Except it wasn't the breaks I slammed on. 

Um, I may have hit the accelerator.  Over the concrete parking block I went.  The sidewalk too.  And up two steps almost reaching the door to our hotel room.  At which point I did indeed stop.

And every single person in the car was deadly silent as we took in what had just happened.

I mean not one peep.


Crickets.

I looked in the rear view mirror at my sister Lyndsey who was twelve or thirteen at the time and her face was a mixture of shock and awe.  Her eyes were bulging out of her head and her mouth was agape. 

Looking back, Colleen had to have wanted to kill me, but she didn't.  Instead we slowly backed up and despite the gawd awful noise it made going back over the concrete parking block I thankfully hadn't done any real damage. 

Later that day, my baby cousin swallowed a penny sparking a six hour trip to the children's hospital... once everyone got a look at the perfect circle on his x-ray and laughed about my aunt Kathy having to go through his diapers until it came out, they had all but forgotten about Michelle driving up the steps of the Holiday Inn. 

Um.  Or at least I'd like to believe that.