To most people, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road sounds bloody hard. However, It’s actually a lot easier than you think.
Here’s my step by step guide to turning right on red, ignoring the posted speed limits and just generally driving around like a dickhead:
- Realise that Massachusetts won’t convert your perfectly good, hard to obtain and hold Australian licence. They will only convert foreign licences from: Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Germany, France and Taiwan. Go figure.
- Gather up every scrap of documentation you can find to prove you’re not an illegal immigrant and wait 2hrs at your closest RMV to take your written & eye test. Pass them both.
- Walk out of the RMV with your large hunk of cardboard
with the block letters “NOT VALID FOR IDENTIFICATION” on it – not the legit plastic card you had expected like while you were on your L’s back home (a). - Book a road test at an RMV on the opposite side of the state from where you live because there’s nothing else available and you’re sick of carrying around your passport to get a beer.
- Drive 3hrs in the car with your future in-laws because they’re super nice and want to help you out – only to get rejected at the Woop Woop RMV (b) because the car you took is registered in Florida and Massachusetts doesn’t like that. Drive 3hrs back home with the in-laws.
- Book another road test in Woop Woop because there still aren’t any road tests available nearby. Drive 1.5hrs to the RMV with your future father-in-law who is doing you the same favour again. Then get asked to perform your hand signals by the inspector (WTF?!), manage to correctly remember them somehow. Then fail the test when the instructor asks you how to park on an imaginary hill, facing uphill – because you turned your wheels into the kerb, not outwards to the street like he wants.
- Have an existential crisis.
- Recover your sanity by thinking about how cool it would be to be Drake. Do this for 6 weeks.
- Get curious and try to book another road test, this time you get really fucking lucky because you just snapped up the one booking available near the city.
- Drive like a champ ( a 96-year-old lady) and pass the test.
And that’s all there is to it! 5-10 business days later you finally get your plastic card in the mail. Hectic.
a) “L’s” is short for Learner Licence in Australia – It takes at least 1 year, and many people longer to move on and obtain their “P’s” – Provisional Licence. Then a further 3 years to get your full ‘black/gold’ Licence.
b) ‘Woop Woop’ is a generic Australian term for a place very far away.