Week 4 was pretty easy, not much physical work but a lot of theory outdoors while it was SNOWING. For heavens sake, its mid of April, and its snowing??!?!?!? I didn’t have any problems that there wasn’t much physical work in schedule this week, but this week I was looking forward to do something physical. Being outdoors while its snowing is cold, but standing in the snow without moving for hours is FREEEEEZING!!
Ah well, at least the sargeant was just as annoyed as we were. „lets have a cigarette before the break“ and stuff like that, well it surely brightened up the day :-). After about 1.5 days of theory we finally to the license to start the engine. No word about moving the damn thing. After that we had some practical training in driving those cars called „PUCH“. It feels like driving a Tank. Bumpy, noisy, cold. Ah well, at least we don’t have to walk. After a while you get a feeling for the car and it gets quite easy to drive them. Of course our instructor also noticed that and gave us some trailers to pull around…
I never thought that maneuvering a Trailer backwards would be so fiddly and fragile. But after about 2-3 hours training i got the general idea.
The highlight was the collective driving school. everyone received a map with a predefined route and some checkpoints on it. Now always 2 driver got into a Puch with trailer or Sprinter without trailer and headed off to the first Checkpoint. The idea was to follow the exact route on the map. It turned out that this wasn’t so easy at all…
after half of the route and a small snack we swapped cars. Now i was driving a sprinter. What a charm this was compared to the puch. And the best of it all, it has a CAR RADIO! The way back was a piece of cake as my co-Pilot and I knew the route very well 😉 so no surprise that we were in the first group to get back.
Now we had to clean the vehicles and park them back in the lot, fill up the petrol tank and check if anything broke… all in all we had about 90 mins to get the cars fit again. then we finally could go to bed. By the time I showered and got to bed it was about 00.30 in the night…
The next day we received the permission to transport people in the Puch. That is 6 passengers in the back and 2 in front (including driver). In week 6 we will have the second block of training, probably for the Duro’s.