Tolls

$12.06

That's the total amount of tolls collected from 13 transactions from our toll transponder in the past year ... including five tolls on our beach trip in Florida last spring.

A few days ago we received in the mail a bill for tolls from our trip to Florida in December.  (Our toll transponder does not work in Florida.)  We drove past every toll booth, knowing that they would take a picture of our vehicle (and license plate) and mail us later.  And they did. :)

In the fall, we received a bill from the toll authority near Louisville.  We had driven across the new bridge in September, justifying it by saying, "We drove it 2 or 3 years ago, despite the signs that it's a toll road, and never paid anything." 

Guess what?!  They kept track of our tolls and waited until we had accumulated a certain amount (even 2 or 3 years later) to bill us for all of our crossings of the bridge!

Tolls were a fact of life in Japan, albeit for a lot less money.  

Some typical driving times on the expressway are 5 hours from Kyoto to Tokyo at a cost of 9,800 yen in expressway tolls, Nagasaki-Kumamoto (1 hour, 2,800 yen), Tokyo-Hakone (1 hour, 20 minutes, 1,800 yen), Sendai-Morioka (2 hours, 5,800 yen), Tokyo-Hiroshima (9 hours, 16,000 yen).

I remember stopping at toll booths in West Virginia a few months after returning from Japan, and being really confused, because, although I could drive successfully on the right side in the USA, there was something about being at a toll booth (mainly a Japanese experience for me) that left me feeling like I was on the wrong side of the road!