Blogs about the baby, Tickets, tolls

Well, I've been meaning to do this for quite some time. I've made my name more anonymous, now... and now christopher's posts get his own blog. So... if you want to see his posts, Send me an e-mail (mraiford at google mail service, gmail.com). This is mostly for protection of my wife and son. People you don't want finding things on the internet tend to find things on the internet.

Now,

On to my blog post subjects today, Tickets and Tolls.


We went to an event at a local city, and it was hot. I wanted to get a couple drinks for us, so went to one of the many concession stands and attempted to order. "That'll be 5 tickets, please!"

... Excuse me? Tickets? Why do I need tickets? I'm sure there's a nice marketese explanation as to why I need tickets: "To better serve our guests and make it more convenient for them"

Right .... In the end it winds up being a hassle, since I have to wait in line for tickets, when I found an empty concession stand just seconds ago. I think they do it in hopes that you don't try to cash them back at the end of the day. Oh well, at least the drinks were more affordable than the Balloon Festival.. eesh .. $5 for a cup of lemonade from powdered drink mix.

Tolls. Recently, not too long after adding tolling a previously toll-free road, the state's legislature decided it wasn't getting enough money from the most expensive toll road in our area (It used to be free). They needed to make the other tolled route more expensive as well. I'd love to see them actually use these tolls to help alleviate the traffic problem in our area instead of building even more toll roads.

The sad thing is, one toll plaza is virtually unavoidable. In order to skip that one, I'd have to take a circuitous route that involves plenty of extra drive time and quite a bit of back tracking for good measure. Fine. I'll go through that one. But I'm avoiding toll roads whenever possible, even though the tolled route (the one that was always tolled, never free) was the most efficient route.