Done with Training!

The week was fairly quiet. Tuesday between classes I decided to do a little geocaching around home, and went for a walk around Tom Frost Reservoir, which is near my house. Wednesday it decided to snow, and while it wasn't torrential, it was very slushy and made the roads very slick, so after my first class I drove back home and curled up with a book on C# (C-Sharp), a fairly new programming language.

This weekend consisted of more bus training. Saturday we had Dine, Jordan and myself back with Dien the trainer. He took us around some very tight roundabouts to start off, and those were fun. Just as we were about to start some WillVill loops, we were called off of training to cover for a driver that had not shown up for her run. We drove down to Aurora, almost to the airport, to pick up a busload of middle schoolers for the basketball game at the Coors Event Center. The run is called Ralphie's Roundup, in which we pick up grade school kids from the Denver area and take them to see a sports event, so it's a very cool program. But by the time we got the kids to the game, they had already missed an hour of the game. That was too bad, but we had done all we could.

For lunch, Jordan, Dine and I grabbed some Subway and wandered around Target for a while. We had a blast! We played four-square in the aisles, played with the iPod docks, and bought a box of ice cream sandwiches. After lunch, we finally got to start WillVill loops, and Dien let us bring on passengers. Every few stops he would announce that, "This is a training bus, and the driver is a trainee. You're welcome to ride, but if you're not comfortable, you have an opportunity to wait for the next bus." Nobody ever got off, so we must've done alright.

Sunday we were back with Adam. We started off the morning with more maneuvers in the BVSD lot, and we all nailed each of the maneuvers. In the afternoon we took a trip through DIA's maze of roads, since I had missed that for Ethel's party. We drove around at Fitzsimons to see the university's hospitals there, and drove almost the entire length of Colfax Blvd. to Golden, then back up to Boulder on Highway 93. It was quite the tour.

All three of us have accumulated more than 40 hours of training, so we've all scheduled individual times to meet with Steven during the week and be tested. Steven is a certified CDL tester, but I've heard he's quite a stickler. He has to be one, as the state can come back with an inspector and re-test his drivers. If they fail with the inspector present, Steven is also liable. I'm testing Friday, so wish me luck!