Right as I type, we’re just about to cross the Ohio border into Pennsylvania. Travel highlight of the day was discovering that the management of the Self-Park parking lot in Chicago (Near the Palmer House Hilton) are, collectively, bald-faced, pants-on-fire liars. There’s a big low-hanging sign at the entrance that says the clearance for the garage is 6′10.” Our car has one of those Thule cargo-carriers on top and the clearance appears to be 6′9′’ and a half. (I don’t know the exact number because we got a new one when our hotel in Colorado broke the older, smaller, one). Anyway, the car juuuussst barely made it under the clearance sign, which I took to mean we’d be okay in the whole garage. Well, silly me. The clearance to leave the garage was about 6′6′’ which we discovered with seconds to spare (this was after the Thule scraped the ceiling several other times on the way out). So, we had to unpack it, take the whole thing off at the turnstyle area, carry it to where we could re-attach it, and then re-attach it — all under the watchful eye of an attendant who did exactly nothing to help save to ask “How’d you get that thing in here?”

So, you self-park bastards, I have some ideas about what you can self-park where. In the meantime, change your sign or raise your ceilings, and while you’re trying to figure out which is cheaper, send me a check for my 30 bucks.