Editor’s note: Mark Bradford is contributing occasional posts from his diary on traveling the country with his wife Wendy while they rent out their Mishawaka home for six months.
Day 3 of our 190-day sojourn
June 29 — Pittsburgh Pa.
Money Spent today: Gas — $51; ticket to ride the Duquesne Incline — $10; valet parking — $38 = $99 today. $179 total….so far we have used hotel points and prepaid tickets. So, out of pocket expenses are low
It is always the parking garage. Always.
Today, Wendy and I got along great, even when I decided to follow the squiggly lines on our map that created a 30-minute detour on hilly and winding country roads and even when Wendy decided to break into what seemed to be a “wedding venue” building at the top of the incline (there was nobody there and, again, the police did not show up). Neither of us yelled at the other. So we were doing well.
Until the parking garage.
I am old enough to recall the good old days when you handed your ticket to a guy who looked like he had just gotten out of rehab. There was a lot of reassurance in just seeing someone who could press the button and let your car out of jail, even if the guy looked scary. It has taken me a few years to get used to the instant billing as I fly down the toll roads of life without ever stopping. Each time I do that, I fear I am doing something wrong.Yet so far, it has worked 99 percent of the time.
However, it seems that every time I either enter or exit an unmanned parking garage, something bad happens, and today was no exception. We “had the app” that was supposed to zoom us in and out of the Forbes Garage that we thought was across the street from our hotel. I was excited to see no one was behind me and as I pulled up to the machine so I was fairly confident.
My confidence disappeared immediately when a demanding electronic voice said, “TAKE THE TICKET OR SHOW A VALID ID.” I grabbed Wendy’s cell phone that had the app on it and read the instructions to hold the QR Code directly in front of the blinking red light. We were supposed to then be able to zoom through.
Well, guess what? No blinking red light. No zoom, and the electronic voice kept demanding that I either take a ticket or show my ID. Wendy of course is yelling in my other ear to “Just wave the QR Code here and “JUST WAVE THE QR Code THERE!”
After a few moments, she exited the car and tried it. No luck. Finally she said “Just take the ticket.”
“Fine.” I replied. The gate went open and soon we had a ticket and a parking place which, to our surprise, was at least a 15-minute walk from our hotel. So as I started to exit the car, Wendy said. “I don’t want to park here.” She said it quietly like she did not know it was going to drive me crazy, which it did.
“How are we going to get out of here without a valid code?” I asked. At that point, she launched into secondary reasoning that no male can understand, including something about they must know we have an emergency or that we are tourists or something.
Then I calmed down because I knew I was with the luckiest person on earth. We backed out of the parking space, drove up to the machine, which was still in a bad mood, shoved the ticket into the machine’s mouth, without a credit card payment, and, amazingly, the gates went up. I seized the opportunity and gunned the car through the open gate and drove off.
We did not look back. Freedom, sweet freedom was ours. We did, however, pay $38 for valet parking. Oh, well.