Monday, January 11, 2016

Gratitude Monday: Street legal

As you may know, I’m a fourth-generation Californian. From Los Angeles. Which means that my car is very important to me.

I knew when planning my relocation to the District They Call Columbia that it would take some time to ship my car from California. When I moved from Virginia to Seattle, it was two weeks, but my employer paid for a rental car during that between-time. Not happening this time, so I was expecting to be reliant on public transportation for at least another week.

Imagine my surprise, then, to get an email on Tuesday announcing that the dispatcher for the shipping company was trying to reach me; the driver was scheduled to deliver my car the following morning.

Well, it was a bit of a scramble, but I managed to find an address near the Reston Metro station where I thought there’d be room to offload a vehicle from one of those auto-transport trailers, and I hauled out there to meet the driver’s schedule (which was obviously much more important than mine).

Imagine my surprise (again) to see the rig with my car parked in front of it on the off-ramp to the Dulles Toll Road (not the address I’d given) as the train was pulling into the station. Well, whatever, I hotfooted it over there, signed for it and prepared to drive away.

It was covered by a film of filth—the kind of thing you see on abandoned cars and vehicles in junk yards. I don’t know what the hell that rig drove through on the way from Burlingame, but it was mighty dirty. The windshield wipers in the front and rear wiper in the back scraped some of it off, but the side windows and mirrors were practically opaque.

Still—I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to bring both my sat-nav unit and the Capitol Hill parking pass with me, and made my way back to the District. Not only that, but I found a parking spot only a couple of blocks from my residence. (This is truly a miracle, because I’m very close to the working guts of congressional offices. Daytime parking spots are basically in the hen’s teeth category.)

As I backed and filled, a Prius hovered nearby, obviously in hopes that I was trying to leave and not get in. But as it drove away in disappointment, I waxed anxious over which way I should leave the permit on my dash—QR code toward the engine or the interior? I figure that if the parking enforcement personnel don’t find it in exactly the configuration they’re expecting, they’ll cite your ass and move on.

Friday I picked up my E-ZPass transponder at the downtown AAA office, and that afternoon I registered it (not online, as their site didn’t work, but some nice young woman from somewhere way south of the Mason-Dixon Line got the job done on the phone).

BTW—when I left the area eight years ago, the toll between Reston and I-66 totaled $0.75. It’s now $3.50. They start you out with $35 on your account. You’d blow through that in your first week of commuting.

I was so glad to discover that Friday night’s rain was sufficient to clear enough of the film on my windows so I didn’t have to take it to a car wash. And, as I was driving out to Reston for breakfast on Saturday, the transponder worked. And on my return to the Hill of the Capitol, I found street parking right across the street from my flat.

Honestly, it just don’t get better than that, vehicularly speaking. And this Californian is really grateful for all of it.



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