Welcome to Hell

I visited Hell this morning.

It has definitely earned it's reputation.

My little corner of Hell was called "The Pierce County District Court". If there are slums in Hell then I surely was cruising through one of the worst.

It all started three weeks ago (give or take). When we had the happy occasion to go over to what my brother Mike calls the "Wet Side". In other words the greater Seattle Tacoma area.

Mike and Cindy live in the most beautiful and charming little, Dick and Jane, town you've ever seen. It has things like Bowling night, Swim night, Halloween activities, even Town Meetings. You are always welcome in FirCrest Washington.

A little slice of Paradise.

In fact if Don and I had just stayed in FirCrest everything would have been just fine.

We didn't of course.

We decided to go exploring. For some inane reason I wanted to check out some of the stores that Tacoma has that we can only dream of here in the Tri-Cities.

What we got, was lost.

At one point in our state of motoring confusion we ended up crossing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. A nice enough bridge. A bridge that you would never suspect harbors a nasty little surprise.

It is a TOLL BRIDGE!

Now I knew that there was a Toll Bridge somewhere around there. I was so frustrated at the whole mess of having no idea where we were, and so worried if I had the cash on me to pay the toll in case this was "THAT" bridge, that I didn't even see the Toll Booth. Don ( who was the one driving) apparently saw it but said that he didn't know what to do because there didn't appear to be anyone there to take our money.

Enough background. About a week after we got home, we received an official looking envelope with a Gig Harbour Stamp on it.

Gig Harbour being one of the other little communities in the general Tacoma area.

I knew it had to be something bad.

I'm smart enough to know that it wasn't a nice little survey saying something like,

"We are so happy that you visited our little town, please fill this out to let us know what you liked and what you think could use some improvement."

Yeah right!

It turned out to be a nasty little notice that we had been photographed "in the act." Our little crime spree, that consisted of "sneaking" right past the toll booth. Oh yes, Don and I are such hard core criminals.

We were assessed with a 52 dollar fine.

"Alright" I thought. "This really sucks, and I would love to scream at somebody about how MEAN and UNFAIR it is". I knew though, that it would be best to just cut a check and mail it off as soon as possible.

I had every intention of doing just that too. Then I make the mistake of showing it to Don.

He was even more offended by it than me.

The problem though, was that he told me NOT to pay it just yet. He wanted to mitigate in the hopes that it would be thrown out or at least reduced. I told him it was only 52 dollars and it would be better to just pay the stupid thing so we wouldn't need to worry about it.

But no. As far as Don was concerned his pride couldn't let him just cave in, he wanted to fight.

Weird.

Usually I'm the aggressive one in the relationship.

So very reluctantly, I let it go. I was uneasy about the whole business though. I am almost always the one who handles these kinds of sordid little affairs.

But, Don wanted to handle it so I let him handle it.

I couldn't stop myself though, from asking him every other day if he had taken care of our little problem. "No." "Not yet." "But don't WORRY."
" I'm going to take care of it. "

Did I mention that the deadline was April 19th and that the 19th was coming closer and closer? Well it was. I thought about just paying the dumb thing and getting it over with. I should have, I should have, I SHOULD have.

. . . . . . . .To be continued. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .