Car Watching.

I have a new past time.
Why people watch when car watching is so much more entertaining.
Hubby had another blood test today, so I sat in the car with the dog and waited.
That was after we eventually got a parking space.

The doctor’s surgery has a small car park at the rear for about 10 vehicles, 11 if you are cheeky and park in front of the double garage currently used for storage.
The side road leading to said car park is always full of parked vehicles that are nothing to do with the surgery or the residents, so could belong to the hospital staff working opposite the surgery. People park directly opposite the entrance, and beyond park on both sides of the road, not only restricting access, but also your view of any oncoming traffic.
When we arrived, a car was coming out, so we believed there was a free space.
The vehicle leaving was bigger than ours, but the spot it came out of was, let us say confined. It didn’t help that we had an audience, including a guy in a small Peugeot puffing away on his e-cigarette who had parked at an awkward angle (probably couldn’t see through the smog).
I’m a confident driver, but Hubby took over behind the wheel and managed to get our car into the vacated space/ Except he couldn’t get out, so reversed out again almost kissing the back bumper of the car alongside. Luckily for us, another car left and he nipped into that slot instead.

As I sat there, I noticed that the e-smoker had a good six feet behind him and if he just reversed that little bit, it would give other vehicles more manoeuvering room.
Cars came and went, all with difficulty, especially with a car in front of the garage and another angled adjacent to the entrance itself.

Then came the Big Boy, a huge white crysler 4 X 4, twice as high as us, twice as long and one and a half times as wide. He shunted backwards and forwards, trying to get into a small space, reversed in front of the gate to the surgery blocking the path, then backed up in front of the car in front of the garage. In so doing, he was blocking the exit of 6 vehicles, ours included. He just sat there, engine running, burning about £1 a minute in fuel.

Then this little red car came in.
The passenger got out, and directed it past the white one, so that it could take up residence in the space where he didn’t fit. Then, the white car reversed out of the car park altogether, and the driver of the red car dumped her shopping in the back of it, and got in the driver’s seat as the original driver went into the surgery. The passenger then drove the red car out.
How weird was that? I wondered how the original driver would get home.

Next, a silver car came in and parked up, shortly followed by a blue car that parked in front of the garages as that space was now free. The silver driver waited by the gate as the blue driver helped a child out of the back, then after words were exchanged, the blue driver and child got back in their vehicle, someone came out of the surgery and got in the passenger seat, and they drove away. The silver driver went into the surgery.

Even odder was the car parked adjacent to the entrance.
The driver came out of the surgery (though I didn’t know it then) and went to talk to the passenger in the e-smoker’s Peugeot. After a few minutes, she walked to her car, got in and drove it into the car park to a vacated space.
She went somewhere else, and when she came back, a young couple with a baby in a pushchair was just coming out. Lots of ooing and aahing over baby, more conversation with the Peugeot passenger, then she got back in her own vehicle and drove out of the car park turning right.
Into a dead end road, with half a dozen houses at the bottom. Made me wonder if she lived there and couldn’t be bothered to walk to the surgery!
It’s a busy surgery at the best of times, but this afternoon my imagination was in overdrive seeing ‘illicit meetings’, ‘secret rendezvous’ and ‘smuggling’ !