Long story short: I’m (24M) American, and I’m visiting my long-distance Romanian boyfriend for the first time soon. In Romania, most cars are manual - including all the ones owned by my boyfriend’s family (I’ll be staying with them). I’ve never driven a manual before. His dad told me he can give me a quick lesson, and that I’m welcome to use their cars if I want; otherwise, I can rent an automatic. I don’t have access to any manual cars here in the U.S. to practice on, so I’m not sure what to do.
I took my driving lessons with a manual, but have been driving automatic for over a decade now.
Whenever I do need to drive a manual, I usually need a while to get used to it again. At those moments I make use of the guidelines that were taught to me by my driving instructor:
It’s a simple helper that matches most of the common speed zones in the Netherlands (30, 50, 80). From what I can quickly read, the 80 zone is 90 in Romania, so it should still work?
Anyway, don’t worry too much. It is also nice not having to drive at all if it comes down to that, your boyfriend’s family sounds nice :)
Enjoy your trip!
Not quite that simple. Speed is only a rough guideline. When you shift depends largely on how hard you’re accelerating. In a typical car if you’re trying to get up speed to get on the freeway, 25 is way too soon to shift into 3rd. I wouldn’t until at least 30. Same if you’re going up a hill, at 25 the car won’t have enough torque for 3rd gear.
It was just a basic guideline being taught to me back then. And I guess it’s mainly for cruising speeds. You might want to stick with a lower gear for accelerating. There are of course all kinds of exceptions. And NL is basically flat, so I don’t know about hills :)
But the km/h list gives me something to fall back on when in doubt. Driving is stressful enough for me as it is.