Good times parking this week

I had tickets to the Oilers season opener on Sunday and left work at my usual quitting time, 6pm.  I had forgotten that the hockey game actually started at 6 as well, since it was a Sunday game and those games are generally earlier.  I got off work and drove to Rexall where I expected to outwit the parking gate guys and park in the Northlands parking lot and walk over to Rexall.  As soon as I got to the gates where you should pay, I realized all booths were empty.  I looked around and proceeded to drive straight through the gate, saving myself a whopping $12 on parking.  But I wasn't just going to be satisfied with free parking.  I maneuvered around parking attendants and illegally park cars until I found it.  At last.  After I had just missed the first goal of the game by Shawn Horcoff.  The closest parking spot possible right by the ramp to get to Rexall was open, or at least it looked that way from where I was.  I figured when I drove up to it, it would have a Smart car parked in it and I would have to park miles away once again.  But no.  Shockingly, it was open and I pulled right in and was in to watch the game in no time.

THEN, my parking luck continued yesterday.  I parked in the loading zone at school because really, it was way too cold and windy and I had too much to do to want to park at least 15-20 minutes away in residential.  When the time came to move my car when my 30 minutes was up, I drove around the parkade in hopes of finding a semi-close parking spot.  I turned the corner and luckily, two cars up, there was an opening.  I pulled up and checked for a fire hydrant or a "no parking" sign.  There was bound to be one of the two because those spots are never open.  But no.  It was actually an open spot.  Now it was time for me to perfect the finer points of parallel parking.  Let's face it: whenever someone gets their license, all driver's ed tips go out the window, and the first one is generally parallel parking because everyone hates it.  It's difficult to master and time consuming to repeatedly try to park while people that walk by just laugh because clearly you are having trouble.  This was definitely one of those days for me and took me at least three times to even partially get my car in the spot.  I did succeed, however, because I would never pass up an opportunity for close, free parking.

AND that's not all!  Today when I arrived at school at the early hour of 7am, I pulled into the closest parking lot there is to the RTA building.  Parking is generally $5 but for me today?  FREE.  Yes, my parking luck continued yet again as the parking machine read "Machine out of Order".  I really didn't have a problem with this but figured I should call the number on the machine just so that I wouldn't get a ticket.  Security picked up and when I told them the situation, he replied with "I''ll have someone check into it.  You'll be fine to park there today".

Score.