Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Long Arm of the Law


Not too long ago I found myself on the wrong side of the law.  It wasn’t the first time I had been caught transgressing our nation’s driving laws.  The last time I was pulled over for speeding was extremely annoying.  Allow me to set the scene.  I was staying at a lodge in the mountains with friends, the majority of whom were skiing at the mountain which this lodge conveniently was located at, or Breckinridge to be precise.  I, being the frugal (or cheap, depending on your point of view) person that I am, having purchased a season pass to another set of slopes, opted to take the 30 minute drive up the road to ski there rather than skiing with everybody else.  I don’t remember the cost of the tickets but this saved me somewhere in the ballpark of $120 over a two day period.

Imagine the bitter irony, when, only about a half mile from the lodge, I was pulled over for speeding through the tiny town of Breckinridge.  Sadly, I had just noticed that my speed was a bit high, and had already started slowing down when I saw the police car behind me.  Needless to say, the ticket I received cost me more than it would have cost me to simply ski the very mountain where I was staying.  Aggravation really isn’t a strong enough word to express my sentiments about that point in time, but what are you going to do?

Flash forward almost 3 years, as my speeding ticket is finally about to drop off my record, dropping my insurance rates back down (no, I wasn’t even counting that cost in the equation), and here I found myself with a police car following me once again with its lights flashing.  This time I was driving on a country road where the speed limit is inexplicably only 40 mph.  As it turns out, I was doing 50, but that wasn’t the surprising part of my conversation with the police officer.  The surprising part came when he asked me about my Illinois plates and I explained that I am in the military.  He actually gave me a warning ticket and thanked me for my service!  I had heard of warning tickets before, but as someone who has been pulled over several times and never received one, somehow they were in the realm of semi-believable entities, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.  I don’t know if I like Texas or not but I do like Texans!