Parallel Parking

For those of you who may not know, parking in the city can be a major pain. After spending 3 years at Moody Bible Institute, located in downtown Chicago, I became accustomed to parallel parking because I wasn't going to fork over the money to pay for a space in the MBI parking lot, thus I chose to find my luck on the street. More often than not, it worked. I say all of this to say that my years in college are where I learned how to parallel park (my hometown of Davis, IL with a population of 700, didn't require that driving skill). I have been very fortunate that the only 2 cars that I have owned are small, compact cars. My first car being a 1991 Hyundai Excel and my current car being a 2001 Ford Focus zx3. With the size of those cars, I am very confident that I can fit in most places on the street. So, let me finally get to the point of this pointless entry.

Last night Rachel and I were coming home from small group and there wasn't too many open spaces on our street. If I haven't mentioned before, the street we live on is a one way with houses on one side so there is parking on both sides and it is never difficult to find a space. In fact, there usually are spots right in front of our place. But last night there just wasn't any open spots except for one that Rachel thought was for sure too tight a squeeze. I was going to bypass any idea of finding a spot in front of our house until she mentioned that there would be no way that I could fit there. The challenge was put forth! She wasn't even challenging my parallel parking abilities but I just had to prove her wrong. And boy did I ever do just that. Not only was the spot extremely small and it had to be a perfect parallel parking job for my car to fit but the car that I squeezed between was the new Cadillac of our landlord and the mini-van of our neighbor who is incidently, our block captain. Risky business, but I am a pretty darn good parallel parker. My wife said it herself.

Now, because I wrote this silly entry, you can expect that I will write an entry of some forthcoming parallel parking disaster that I will experience. That is, if you believe in that stuff.