Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for November 28, 2020

so don’t want to scratch the three cars’ paints

What the hey, park across the street! (Maybe it’s worth buying a car that’ll do it for you.)

Hint: Tape paper tubes (or something similar) to the corners of the car so the driver will know where they are in relation to where they want them to be.

The hardest part I learned was to turn left from standing with a stadard shift. Try coordinating hands and feet with a clutch.

Learn to trust your mirrors. Being a retired truck driver, I find it hard to trust the back-up camera in my wife’s Subaru. I’ll take mirrors any day!

Remember “curb feelers”? :-o

When I taught my kids to parallel park I used traffic cones to represent the other cars until they go good enough not to hit anything.

Not bad. Not bad at all,,,,,

I hate the Buick commercial with the kid using the automatic parallel parking feature during his driving test. I always imagine the next scene where the instructor orders him to turn it off or flunk the test, and the kid flunks anyway because he always relied on the automatic feature and never learned how to do it properly.

Also, I’m not sure they’d ever have new drivers do the parallel parking part with real cars involved because the cars might get hit. When I took my test, we were in the parking lot of the DMV and used cones. (I flunked the first time but practiced and passed the second time)

Our test had you stop on a hill and start up again without rolling back. That’s with a stick shift.

I saw a single-panel cartoon many years ago: a ’61 Studebaker Lark DeLuxe (two headlights and inboard parking lights) carrying a sign on top that read HARBOR DRIVING SCHOOL, nervous instructor in the passenger seat, nervous student driving, and the Lark had life-saver rings hanging off the doors and fenders.