My name is Mark, I\u2019m 37, and this happened during a weekend trip to Las Vegas. I was in town visiting a friend and staying at a small hotel just off the Strip. Parking in Vegas can already be a bit chaotic, but I thought I had found a perfectly reasonable spot on the street about half a block from the hotel.<\/p>\n
There were a few other cars parked along the curb, so I pulled in, double-checked that I wasn\u2019t blocking a driveway, and went inside for the night.<\/p>\n
The next morning I walked outside with my coffee, ready to grab breakfast.<\/p>\n
My car was gone.<\/p>\n
At first I thought maybe I had somehow forgotten where I parked it, which felt unlikely since the street was short and there were only a handful of spots. After walking up and down the block twice, I noticed the dreaded orange sticker on a nearby pole.<\/p>\n
\u201cVehicle towed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently my car had been taken to a nearby tow lot.<\/p>\n
So I called the number on the sticker, confirmed they had my car, and grabbed a rideshare over to the lot to pick it up.<\/p>\n
When I got there, the employee behind the window asked for my ID and then casually said, \u201cThat\u2019ll be $85.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, compared to some horror stories I\u2019ve heard about towing fees in big cities, $85 wasn\u2019t the worst thing in the world. Still annoying, but manageable.<\/p>\n
I paid the fee, got my receipt, and they pointed me toward the back lot where my car was sitting among a row of equally unlucky vehicles.<\/p>\n
Before driving away, I wanted to figure out why it had been towed in the first place.<\/p>\n
So I drove back to the street where I had parked the night before.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I saw it.<\/p>\n
About ten feet behind the parking spot was a \u201cNo Parking Anytime\u201d sign.<\/p>\n
Except the sign had been completely hidden behind a giant fallen palm frond that had blown down from a nearby tree.<\/p>\n
The leaves were so big they basically formed a curtain over the sign. From the angle where I parked, there was absolutely no way to see it.<\/p>\n
I stood there staring at it for a solid minute.<\/p>\n
Technically the sign existed, so the tow company had probably followed the rules.<\/p>\n
But practically speaking, the sign might as well have been invisible.<\/p>\n
To make things even better, as I stood there looking at the hidden sign, another driver pulled into the exact same spot I had used the night before.<\/p>\n
I rolled down my window and warned him about the sign behind the palm frond.<\/p>\n
He looked at it, shook his head, and said, \u201cVegas, man.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least someone else got the warning before becoming the next $85 customer at the tow lot.<\/p>\n
As for me, I\u2019ve learned a valuable lesson.<\/p>\n
In Las Vegas, it\u2019s not enough to check for parking signs.<\/p>\n
You also have to check for large tropical leaves hiding them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My name is Mark, I\u2019m 37, and this happened during a weekend trip to Las Vegas. I was in town visiting a friend and staying at a small hotel just off the Strip. Parking in Vegas can already be a bit chaotic, but I thought I had found a perfectly reasonable spot on the street […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usenglishstory.bestlistproduct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}