Memory Lane Monday - First speeding ticket

I have to admit - I've never actually gotten a speeding ticket. Yes, I am aware that I am probably jinxing myself here so keep an eye out for a post in the near future about my first speeding ticket, LOL.

I have however, been the unhappy recipient of two auto-related tickets in my lifetime (so far). Neither was for speeding, although I was originally pulled over for speeding in one of the two cases.

More about that one in a minute though. The first ticket I ever got was a few months after I moved to Kalamazoo for college in 1990. I lived in an apartment in the 'student ghetto' as it was affectionately known. My particular street was a standard residential one, but about a block down from my apartment it ended at a cross-street, which was a one-way street for traffic headed out of downtown Kalamazoo. You can probably see where this is going...

In my defense, I was driving to the library. Normally, I walked there but for some reason this particular time I was driving. My usual route was to walk to the end of my street, turn right on the sidewalk and walk straight downtown to the library. No problem. When walking, that is. When driving - big problem. I came to the end of my street and started to turn right, as I was used to doing when I walked it. But - that was the wrong way on the one-way street. I realized this as I was turning, but there just happened to be a cop sitting right there and he caught me as I was then turning into a driveway in order to turn around. He was pretty incredulous that I lived right there and had made this mistake, but I was in too much shock at actually being pulled over to explain why. Ticket #1.

The next time I was pulled over was several years later when I was working at my first job out of college. I was in a hurry to get home and was speeding - doing 45 in a 35 mile an hour zone. But - for some strange reason, I hadn't put on my seatbelt that day. Probably the only time in my entire driving career that I had neglected to put the seatbelt on! But in this one case, it saved me from a speeding ticket since the cop saw I had a pretty clean driving record and cited me for the lack of a seatbelt only - at the time it was a fine, but didn't put any points on my driving record. Phew!

I have a couple of friends who've gotten out of tickets by bursting into tears when they got pulled over. I have the feeling that might happen with me (the tears part, at least) if I do ever get pulled over again - we can't afford either a ticket right now or the extra cost that our insurance would go up either. Like I said, I'm probably jinxing myself here, so I'll have to be sure to drive nice and carefully, just in case!

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