Busted!

This weekend, I was a volunteer shuttle driver for an event. I was issued a gigantic SUV that was very cumbersome to drive, yet felt oddly empowering to be sitting so high up above the road. Although in our neighborhood, you about run people off the narrow streets in anything larger than a minivan, so that was quite the experience. Anyway, I got to take the car home overnight, as I had to drive early the next morning, too. So I was driving through town and got to the section of downtown where the lights are synchronized, meaning that if you are driving the speed limit, the lights will be green as you drive down the street. Well, I was going a little over and was coming up on a light that was still red, but could see that the other direction was yellow, so I just kept on rolling, knowing that the light would turn green by the time I reached it. As that's how it turned out, only the automatic traffic light didn't like that one bit and I was treated to a flash from the camera for supposedly running a red light. Oops! Good thing it was a rental and not in my name. (Although if they do come knocking, I'm willing to argue my case, because I really didn't do anything wrong.)

Speaking of automated traffic cameras, that reminds me of some elders in Norway who had gone to a go-cart track on their day off. The day was pretty rainy, and so there weren't any other customers besides themselves. They paid for their 15-minute session, but when the employees all heard that some AMERICANS were driving around and judging our driving skills from movies such as Die Hard, Speed, Days of Thunder, and Fast and the Furious 2: Toyko Drift (okay probably not that one, since it hadn't come out yet), they were all clamoring to drive with them. They ended up driving around for several hours on the track and in the process, getting completely saturated. When they went back to their car to go home, they didn't want to get their seats all wet, so they took off their shirts and sat on plastic bags. Well, on the drive home, a traffic camera snapped their picture for speeding. No big deal, right? Wrong. Missionaries' cars are registered in the mission's name, so the photo of two seemingly naked missionaries speeding down the road went straight to the mission office. I don't know their punishment, but both of them got sent above the arctic circle shortly after that.