Busted!

On Thursday I got my first ticket since moving to California - from a motorcycle cop, no less!

It's my own fault because I knowingly ignored a "wrong way / do not enter" sign. And I've knowingly ignored that sign for quite some time because the fact that it's even there is ridiculous.

The back story - our daycare provider doesn't live too far away from us, but it takes over 10 minutes to go the two miles from our house to hers if we take the main streets due to the amount of traffic and traffic lights. However, if we cut through the residential neighborhoods that separate her house from ours, we can easily cut that trip down by over 50 percent.

The catch is, right around the corner from our daycare provider's house is this large white fence that blocks half the street (everyone refers to it as "the gate"). If we're driving from daycare to home, we can drive through the gate because that is the unblocked, open lane. However, if we drive from home to daycare we're not supposed to drive through the gate because it's intended to allow only one-way traffic through.

I think this is silly because on either side of the gate, the road is two-lane and there are lots of houses on both sides. I don't know whose bright idea it was to suddenly block only one side of the road, but in my opinion the gate should either block the entire road or there shouldn't be a gate at all.

So I've been sneaking through it every morning on my way to daycare. But apparently the cops decided to set up a sting there because I was one of several cars pulled over and ticketed Thursday morning, and my daycare lady's son was ticketed the day before.

I was also cited for not having a front license plate, which is considered a correctable violation - as long as I make an appointment with the DMV and prove that I'd attached a license plate to the front of my car, they'll waive the fine.

The nice thing is, in California you have an opportunity once every 18 months or so to participate in online traffic school which means the points from the ticket aren't applied to your license (Jason has done this twice now!). I essentially just have to take a 15-minute online DMV test and if I pass, no points.

Now I'm just interested to see how much the ticket costs once it arrives in the mail... sigh.