Welcome to my World of Wonderment

Our planet is a neat place, full of weird and unusual people doing weird and unusual things. One oddball thing I like to do is geocache. What other activity is there that makes people travel hundreds of miles to climb a mountain, wade a river, and fight a Bigfoot, just to be the first person to sign a piece of paper rolled up in a 35mm film canister stuffed in the knot hole of a tree? I can't think of any other sport that has such a great mix of technology and the wonderful outdoors. A lot of geocaches are placed in a beautiful setting, or hidden in a challenging or unique way, or in a historical setting. Geocaching allows the finder to share in some of the hiders favorite places, and along the way you get to meet some interesting characters, and occasionally learn something new. While this blog is primarily a geocaching blog, I also use this place to post the occasional funny video or weird news story, or as a platform to rant or rave about something I really have to share. But for the most part this website is about you, the weirdo walking around in circles, talking into your GPS unit like it's a phone, pretending your taking pictures of a phone booth to find find the tiniest micro-cache, or circling your car around and around a light pole in a parking lot trying to retrieve a cache without even getting out of your car.

7/12/08

Life in the Fast Lane

You have to love the Seattle police. They are ticketing stupid people. I can only hope that the police around here follow suit.



SEATTLE -- Even if you're going the speed limit it might not be enough to prevent you from getting a ticket if you're holding up traffic in the fast lane.

State troopers are on a mission to make sure the left lane on area freeways is used for its intended purpose: passing.

"We're doing 58, 59 miles an hour and they are just sitting there, traffic's passing them on the right hand side," Trooper Keith Leary said while pointing out a car in the left lane of Interstate 5. "That's exactly what we don't want to see happen."

The driver, Brasta Bonifcho, said he was surprised what he was doing was illegal.

"I didn't know that, I really didn't know that," he said. "I am guilty, no question about it."

Leary reminded Bonifcho that drivers need to stay in the right lanes unless they're passing another vehicle.

Everyone pulled over during Leary's patrol said they thought it wasn't a problem as long as they were going the speed limit. But the law says otherwise.

"It is a traffic infraction to drive continuously in the left lane of a multilane roadway when it impedes the flow of other traffic," the statute reads.

The reason for the law is to help keep traffic moving and to diffuse potential road rage situations.

"It just takes one thing to set them off," Leary said of frustrated drivers stuck behind slower moving vehicles. "If we can alleviate one of those things, maybe we can avoid an assault."

The State Patrol said several recent collisions caused by slow vehicles in the passing lane have prompted increased enforcement of the law along area interstates.

Drivers in the HOV lanes are exempt from the rule, but anyone else could be facing a $124 ticket.

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