I’m seeing our island with new eyes now – from the passenger seat! I can’t believe how quickly this phase came. It seems like just yesterday that we spent the bulk of our family time exploring the low tidelands catching crabs, hiking magical forest trails, fishing for newts in ponds, and skipping stones across placid waters at dusk.
Life doesn’t get a whole lot faster than that with older kids, thanks to these pandemic times, but our son towers over me and is practicing his stick-shifting skills every free moment he has now that he’s in Defensive Driving School.
It’s not like when I was 15. I just kept a log of my driving times in the car, studied the little official driving booklet, and showed up at the DMV office to take the multiple choice and driving tests when I was 16. No driver’s ed in school or anything.
Not so now. There are a few ways to go about it, but if you want your license at 16, you take a course on the mainland – for $500! Whoa. It lasts one month and thanks to the virus, it’s all on Zoom right now. Perfect timing – fewer expensive, all-day ferry trips.
Here’s what it entails, in case you have a teenager on the brink of driving:
- Three nightly Zoom classes for five weeks – Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 6:30-8:45 PM
- An accompanying workbook to be filled in during the classes
- 10 hours of driving at home with an adult during the month of the class
- Changing your parents’ car tire
- A multiple choice midterm and final online
- 5 official drives with a Defensive Driving School coach in Mt Vernon on the city streets
- 50 total hours of required driving over 6 months before turning 16 and taking the DMV tests (though 100 hours is highly recommended instead)
Our son just finished the class portion of the course this past week, despite having broken his wrist the day the Zooms began and having crashed on his electric skateboard and lying immobilized in bed for his final week of Zooms. Again, thank goodness it’s all online for the time being!
Thankfully, we had made a big effort in the middle weeks to drive as often and as long as possible, especially since we don’t have an automatic.
Orcas High School parking lot 
Out toward West Beach for a good sunset 
Through Moran State Park on a beautiful morning 
Rosario Resort sightseeing 
Cascade Lake 
Getting drive time is different on an island when you live right near town and can walk everywhere you want to go. It’s not like city life, when you hop in the car and log minutes every time your family has to go somewhere. We have to take long, intentional, gas-guzzling drives to non-destinations at the far reaches of the island in order for our son to get practice. We’ve gone places we haven’t seen in years or have never seen at all.
Our first time ever exploring the Eagle Lake area – the farthest community on the island from where we live near town 
There are no traffic lights here. There’s no traffic, period. (I predict summer will be the busiest ever, though.) To get enough practice for rush hour, we have to circle through Eastsound over and over and hope there are some pedestrians at the crosswalks. Our biggest spontaneous confrontation may be a surprised deer in a parking lot or a family grazing by the road.
Thankfully, the five drives on the mainland in Mt Vernon present the usual kinds of challenges most drivers encounter. Not to mention, they have much newer cars with modern doodads inside.
There are other drive schools on the mainland, but this one was by far the most convenient for us islanders in these pandemic times. It’s also very well-run, and is a family business as well. I was impressed by the night class instructor, too. Far from dryly robotic, he involved his own personality and humor to keep things upbeat and interesting. He (and some of the airheaded responses of other students on the Zooms) had my son laughing quite frequently. In the end, I think it’s all well worth it. These kids (the ones who were listening and taking it seriously) know their stuff about being out on the roads. If your son or daughter is getting close to 15½, click here to learn more about this company.
Happy driving, be patient with the 15-year-olds learning these roads, and be patient with the myriad drivers starting to converge here from afar. The ferries have been filling to the brim in the past few weeks and the parking lots in Eastsound have been full, and it’s not even summer yet. Remember, we’ve all been looking at the same four walls for an entire year; you’d want to come to Orcas Island too. (Many of you made it permanent!)
Be smart, be nice, and keep those roads safe…
