Parking Backwards

The only time I got a ticket for parking was in the Midwest. Having grown up in a southern state, one could park in either direction along the curb. In other words, the front of one car could be parked in tandem with the front of another car. Essentially you can pull in to a parking space driving in from either direction. I don’t remember exactly when or where it happened, but I got a ticket for doing it. Well, that never happened again. When we moved to Capitol Hill almost 15 years ago we had to street park. But you could only park in one direction along the curb. There were plenty of other reasons to get parking tickets there. Since we had resident parking stickers we were spared. So when we moved to northern Virginia a couple of years ago I noticed an interesting thing - people parking their cars in either direction. I must say it does look odd but apparently it is all legal. I’m guessing the state of Virginia allows this way of parking, but I don’t think I’m going to test it out myself. That just goes to show you that states do things differently and sometimes you find out the hard way. 

DC Parking Ticket Conundrum

It's really difficult to do even the easiest things in this town. When we bought our last Subaru in Wisconsin eleven years ago, it was registered in Wisconisn, and we parked it in our driveway. Case closed. When we moved to DC, we had to get the car registered in DC and also get resident parking stickers so we can park it in the street since we have no garage or driveway. Both stickers must be displayed on the windshield. Since there are no DC Subaru dealers that we know of, we bought our 2016 Subaru Forester in Virginia - the same place we took our old Subaru for repairs and check ups. We ended up with temporary Virginia license plates that would last a month, and used our resident gust parking permit for parking. So far, so good. We were told the title and the parking sticker and registration would come in the mail within the month. But since nothing goes like it should, we got a fat parking ticket for expired license plates a few weeks back. We did receive our title in the mail, but the registration never came. So we called the Subaru dealer to find out what happened to the registration. It was sitting in their office. They said they called, but we know they didn't. No messages were left, and they didn't have the correct number. So my husband drove over to pick up the registration, we changed our license plates back to DC, plastered the parking and registration stickers on the windshield, and removed the temporary Virginia registration from the windshield with a lot of soap and water and blade. But who was going to pay for the parking ticket? Not us. So it took a couple weeks to get that processed on their end and finally after a lot of back and forth the ticket finally showed $0.00 balance due yesterday.  A pain in the neck? Yes! But I'm glad the nonsense is finally over!