The First Traffic Ticket.

We have now collectively ridden over 100,000 miles on Expedition65 and every one of us has committed every imaginable traffic violation hundreds of times. We have broken speed limits, ridden the wrong way on one-way streets to get through towns, and it is impossible to calculate how many times we have had to overtake on double yellow lines. Bad roads, big hills, slow diesel spewing trucks, erratic buses – you just have to get past them quickly. If we had followed the law, we’d never have been able to cross Colombia.

So it is amazing that to took seven weeks to get a ticket.

Leaving Mendoza to cross the Andes to Santiago, Chile there is a nice highway with great visibility, lots of trucks, and a perfect spot for the local police to park and catch people overtaking on double yellow lines. Sterling and I were at the back of the pack and decided to sweep past a bus and right into the arms of the law.

We tried the “we don’t speak any Spanish” routine (they spoke enough English), we tried the “surely we can pay the the fine here officer” (they were not shaking us down and did not want a bribe), and eventually they took our driving licenses, gave us tickets for offenses described as “Gravisima” (extremely serious), and told us to go to the nearest bank to pay before we’d get our licenses back. That was a 40 Km ride to Uspallata to the bank to pay the $300 fine and ride back to get our documents.

Considering the total cost of fine divided by the total number of offenses since we left, that wasn’t too bad in the great scheme of things.