One Expensive Game of Bowling

As much as I've talked about bowling in the last few months, you'd think we bowl all the time. In fact, until this year, we'd been bowling only once or twice in our first 12 years of marriage. However, last night we bowled for the FIFTH time since February! We're practically little Lebowskis at this point! :)

This most recent bowling excursion was our second outing of its type with our Journey Group friends, so of course it was loads of fun. We went to Jaybowl in the Kansas Union, which is only $2.50 a game for KU students/staff and $3.o0 a game to the general public, so it's ultra cheap. Unfortunately, there's construction going on in the parking lot below the Union next to the stadium, so Chad and I parked in the self-pay parking garage next door. Although it was after 7 p.m., all the signs indicated you had to pay any time except the weekend, so we went to the pay station and put in about an hour and 15 minutes worth of coins. We weren't really sure how diligently the KU parking department patrols this parking lot, but were thinking we'd only be bowling one, maybe two games, so making it back out in just over an hour didn't seem too unreasonable.

Our first game went by so quickly we had plenty of time for a second, but the second game took quite a bit longer after two separate lane malfunctions needed employee intervention to remedy. After adding in a little post-game social time, we headed back to the parking lot just before 9:00--just over 30 minutes after our parking time had expired. Unbelievably, there was already a $20 ticket waiting on our windshield. Even more unbelievably, it had been issued 6 minutes after our time had run out.

Really, we shouldn't be surprised at all by the apparent E.S.P. of the KU parking department when it comes to illegal parking. I must have received 20 tickets in my four years of college, and often times it was for parking in a restricted lot for a 5 minutes dash into a campus building. It never failed that I would get busted then, so I don't know why I'm surprised we got busted now. I guess we erroneously assumed that because it was the evening, and because there were all of 5 cars in the entire 1st level of the garage, and because there were no other available lots nearby, that maybe KU Parking would have mercy on us. We couldn't have been more wrong. The parking department is an always has been one of the more evil entities on campus!!

Chad did fill out an online form trying to contest the ticket (citing the bowling delays due to malfunctioning lanes), but we're not holding out much hope. We're probably just going to have to accept the fact that it was an expensive night of bowling. At least I can say I bowled my best game of the year last night! According to my previous post on bowling, my PR in the lanes was 105 (at least of the outings I blogged about). Last night I bowled a 126 in my second game! I love having a blog so I can remember important statistics like these, as well as rant about annoying things like parking tickets!