The Day We Learned About Street Cleaning

After returning from our wonderful tour of the Bunker Hill Monument we discovered that our van was gone.  We noticed the street cleaning signs while we were looking for a parking spot, but the street that we parked on DID NOT have one, so we thought we were safe.  The only sign that was near us was the one telling you not to park there if there was a lot of snow.  There wasn’t any snow, so we thought we were safe.  Apparently the sign several blocks back applied to our block as well even though we didn’t drive past it.

The other thing that threw us off is that there were lots of other cars all around us – why would they just tow our van?  That’s when I met the mean lady (ML) who runs the Laundromat.  We had parked right in front of her store, so I went in to see if she might have seen what happened.  Not only did she see it, she was the catalyst. 

When I told her that we just walked back from the monument and our van was gone, this is how the conversation went:

ML: “Oh, that was YOUR car?”

Me: “Yes, do you know who I can call so we can get our car back?”

ML: “Uh, try 911”

Apparently she felt the need to have our van towed but felt the other cars were just fine.  Maybe it is because the van had Florida plates.

Since I would not even think about calling 911 to report that a mean Laundromat lady had our rental van towed, I wasn’t sure what our next step would be.  But within moments we saw a policeman, he told us who to call and 90 minutes and $200 later we had our rental van back just in time to pay $20 to park it so we could do the free tour of the USS Constitution.

The lesson learned: DO NOT park on the street on Friday in Boston, because they have invisible no parking signs and mean ladies that work at Laundromats that will seek to destroy you.