Back in my former home of Denver, Colorado, I was once told that the “Denver Boot” was so named because Denver is such a horrible place when dealing with the meter maids. After recently taking the time to research the claim, it is in fact true…and even more to it than I was originally led to believe. The boot was in fact invented in Denver by a violinist with the Denver Symphony Orchestra in 1953, and has since kept its name “The Denver Boot.” The city of Denver is so intense when it comes to parking that our current mayor Hickenlooper based part of his campaign on reforming our ridiculous parking laws. When I left Denver, I thought I had left the boot behind as well.
Throughout most of the world we have not had to worry about parking laws, because we never get tickets since we do not have local license plates. We do still have to worry about getting towed, which we had a problem with in Barcelona. Barcelona is by far the most difficult city to park in that we have visited yet, and there we had to track down a Toyota dealer outside of the city that would allow us to park so that we would not encounter any more fees. Shortly after we were robbed of more valuable TWBR funds by the Barcelona municipal government, half of the team went to Lisbon, Portugal only to get slapped with the notorious invention from our hometown. Brook put together this short segment about the experience, luckily this boot was not too expensive. It is an excellent way of getting people with foreign license plates to pay their parking tickets.
Then again in Casablanca the Sequoia was booted, but now that we are in Morocco, the fee only amounted to a grand total of about $5. Most places in Europe we could not even find an hour of parking for less than this. I would like to give Frank Marugg a big thanks for his car shoe. Since my birthday was decades after his fancy little invention I cannot begin to try to imagine what it was like in the 50s for cars. For now though I would like to give ol’ Frank and all of the people that continue to produce his invention a little piece of advice – CARS DON”T NEED BOOTS, THEY HAVE WHEELS FOR FEET.
Bouey also wrote a blog about the boot when it was put on…click here to read it.
