…to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia:
I love it!
Thanks for the reminder.
The car has long been a great equalizer between men and women. That’s why male dominated societies like the king’s ( with a needed small k) don’t want women to drive ( and be educated). They just might want the freedom the car represents to everyone.
She is a feisty one for sure. I had read a story a few years back that she got tired of waiting for her driver to take her somewhere else on the Castle property, that she just slid into the drivers seat and left him/her behind.
Yosemite
This was a good one.
Read a news story back sometime in the 1970s that she and Prince Phillip were driving somewhere near Sandringham when they encountered an American tourist couple pulled over with car trouble. Queen and hubby stopped and to the amazement of the tourist couple the Queen spent a few minutes finding and fixing the problem with easy expertise. During the war she often was driving trucks through London during Luftwaffe bombing raids. The lady earned her military stripes with real service.
Absolutely, Marnet!
And, in addition to driving transport trucks during WW II, she was trained as a mechanic.
My mother was in the US Navy during WWII. She took a mechanical aptitude test as part of her battery of entry tests, and they wanted to make her a trainer of airplane mechanics. She already had a usable skill (X-Ray technician) and was offended that they wanted her to do anything else, even 3 decades later. Everyone has their own set of personal expectations, and I mean no offense to QE II. This story just reminded me of my mom’s experience.
^
There is a legend–very possibly untrue–that during the same week in WW II, a chef from The Waldorf-Astoria hotel and an experienced trucker were drafted and were assigned to the same base.
After basic training, the chef received training to be a truck driver, and the trucker was trained to be an army cook.
Isn’t that what they use the term “FUBAR” for!!!
Yosemite
Maybe NPR and BBC could create a new CarTalk show with Jay Leno and Queen Elizabeth as co-hosts.
That’s actually not a bad idea, Triedaq!
She is fairly poised when she is on camera. as evidenced by her recent Christmas message for 2014.
Although she was obviously reading from a teleprompter, she prides herself on writing her own speeches.
This lady has greeted every US president since Eisenhower. Their first official joint function was to officially open the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959.
FUBAR is also part of the nickname for a Cleveland Browns quarterback: Johnny FUBAR.
VDCdriver The “legend” of the WW2 chef and trucker is definitely plausible. Although I’m certain the Army’s decision was purely accidental it was actually brilliant. The trucker would likely accept his fate and make the best of it. The chef when forced to conform to Army cooking regulations would have been driven completely insane. It reminds me of the scene with the chef in Apocalypse Now. He is describing Navy cooking school where he is given a high quality beef roast and instructed to boil it. He is explaining why he volunteered for extremely dangerous “Brown Water Navy” duty.
Yosemite An excellent film (The Queen} has a scene where she hops in her Land Rover and goes for a solo drive. I read somewhere that this was not a rare occasion and drove her security people insane.