@1kristarose. I very much enjoyed reading your post. My own 76 year-old mother learned to drive in the 1960s in west Africa, in a 1959 Land Rover and a 1965 VW Beetle. Same thing, manual transmission, power nothing, no synchro mesh anything, and both designed to run on bad gas. To this day she declares that those two vehicles are the only ones in her life she'd ever driven, that she worked up a sweat parking in our driveway. Go mum!
