The Agony of Parking a New Car

Miles Driven: 911

It almost felt like the parking gods were gunning for me.

Walking toward the XC90 in the back corner of Garage 1 at Dulles International, I saw it from at least 50 yards away: a chrome-plated metal baggage cart, rolled up hard against my SUV’s passenger side rear bumper. My pulse quickened. With less than 1,000 miles on the odometer, had my new ride suffered its first ding?

If you ask my family, the parking space hasn’t been created that is so far from our destination that I won’t use it. At restaurants, shopping centers, hotels, and yes, airports, I park as far away from the door as necessary. And by necessary, I mean necessary to ensure that nobody will have any reason to park next to me and accidentally dent my vehicle when opening the door of their own car or truck.

In this, I follow a tradition pioneered in my family by my paternal grandfather, who babied every Buick he owned, as well as the pink ‘57 Cadillac I remember as his favorite. (Among Grandpa’s other motoring quirks, which I don’t share, are these: He seldom drove over 25 miles an hour in town, or 50 miles an hour on the highway. He also avoided left turns and twisty roads. I’m not sure he ever had to replace brake pads. For me and my sister and cousins, learning to ignore the long line of traffic that would build up behind my grandfather when he was at the wheel was part of growing up.)

In my case—as with my grandfather’s—it’s not just new cars that I worry about. Even after owning my GMC Yukon for 16 years, its odometer past 180,000 miles, I would still park it as far as possible from the masses.

I realize, of course, that there are situations in which parking adjacent to another car is unavoidable. When we travel to Penn State for a football game at Beaver Stadium, for example, we park in our assigned spot, which usually has a car to our right. And I remember parking years ago in a tight space between a pair of pickup trucks at a ski resort in the Poconos after I literally couldn’t find any other spots. I left there with two dings in my driver-side door, which irritated me for years.

You can imagine my apprehension, then, in the weeks leading up to our December flight to Las Vegas, as I contemplated the thought of parking the new Volvo in an economy lot that wasn’t familiar to me. Would it be crowded? Would there be a great expanses of empty spots at its outer edges?

(Yes, we could have taken my wife’s 2008 S80. But there were three in our party—me, my wife our middle son—and the luggage would fit much more easily in the XC90. Besides, I was itchy for another long ride in the newest addition to our fleet.)

I tried to reassure myself there would indeed be spaces in the far reaches of the lot that other drivers would ignore. But when we arrived, two days after Christmas, we were greeted with a full lot. Holiday travel.  A parking lot attendant handed me a voucher to park in Parking Garage 1, at the same daily rate charged for the economy lot.

Okay, that sounded like a nice deal. We’d be closer to the terminal, and the car would be under roof, meaning that upon our return we wouldn’t have to worry about clearing off the vehicle if there had been a snowstorm in our absence. But what would the parking situation be like? If the economy lot was full and drivers were being diverted to the garage, then the garage was probably pretty full, too, right? And in my experience, parking garage spaces are seldom generous.

We circled our way up to the fourth floor where we’d been directed, and all looked bleak initially. There were a few open spaces, but they were all between other cars, and none were particularly wide. Then Patti spotted it for me. Toward the back corner, an open space with one car parked conventionally on the left, and another in the space to its right. But the space on the right was the last one in that row, and because it was in the corner, it had gobs of room. The driver had kept his or her car far to the right, meaning the open space I was eyeing had lots of room for me to hang to the right, too. I wouldn’t cross my line, but there would be no reason for anyone on the left to get close to the XC90, and if the car on the right exited, anyone who pulled in would have plenty of room to stay away from it, too. I took the spot, comfortable that I’d hit my first jackpot even before arriving in Vegas.

Still, as our plane touched down on the tarmac at Dulles after our flight home, the old anxiety started to reawaken. Would everything be okay? Again, I tried to assure myself we’d found the best possible spot.

After collecting our luggage in the baggage claim area, we made our way to the parking garage. Exiting the elevator to level four, I was pleased to see that it was nearly empty. Apparently, the holiday travel rush was over. But then I looked ahead to the corner, to the prime spot where we’d left the XC90, and my heart sank.

There was that damn luggage cart right up against the new Volvo.

I couldn’t help myself. I started walking faster, leaving my wife and son to catch up with me. When I reached the car, I could see exactly what had happened. The car in that big space to my right had exited the garage, and several people had decided to leave their luggage carts in the corner space. Three carts were stacked together like shopping carts outside a grocery store, but a fourth had rolled into the Volvo.

I pulled the cart away and eyed the spot where it had come to rest. Because it was nighttime, the light wasn’t particularly good. Still, I didn’t see any damage. My son pulled out his phone and shined its flashlight on the bumper for me. Again, didn’t see anything. I began to believe I’d escaped, miraculously, without a scratch. But I wasn’t prepared to declare victory until I could examine the vehicle in daylight the next day.

When I did, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, indeed, I could see no imperfections in the vehicle’s glossy black paint.

That was a narrow escape. And it reinforced my belief that it always—always—makes sense to park as far away from other drivers as possible, in the distant lonely spaces used by people with shiny Corvettes or restored ’57 Chevys. Or who, like me, can’t abide the idea of getting a scratch or dent that could have been avoided.

Grandpa understood.