Expressway: LI's wide open (parking) spaces

No one who has lived an entire life on Long Island ever appreciates the most important perk to being here. It's not the great schools. It's not the beautiful beaches. It's not the malls. All of these are wonderful, and I am so glad to have them. But the greatest single advantage to living here on Long Island is the ease of parking one's car.

Coming from the city, I struggled for years searching for parking spaces. Often I'd wind up parking in another ZIP code and walking to my house for lack of an available space. And going to the store was always an adventure -- double parking, triple parking, parking by a fire hydrant, parking in a tow-away zone. I mean you really had no choice. Parking spaces were at a premium.

If you needed to pick up a loaf of bread, if you needed to have a prescription filled, or if you wanted to have dinner at a nice restaurant, where you'd park your car was always a concern. And did you really want to leave the house if your car was in a great parking space (that probably took hours to find) and didn't have to be moved until the following Thursday, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., so that your street could be swept?

I did an awful amount of walking to avoid losing that prized spot. I was also a lot thinner back then.

Now all four of my family's cars are parked securely at our house in Kings Park. Two are actually garaged! And as far as that trip to the store, there's always a big lot with plenty of spaces.

The mall? Acres of spots. The beach? Acres more. Of course, there are exceptions -- Jones Beach on the Fourth of July, and some of our train stations on weekdays.

However, the convenience of getting around never fails to astound me. Sometimes I'm incredulous that people actually complain about traffic congestion on Long Island. Traffic congestion? Try driving around Brooklyn or Queens. And if you should by some chance wind up west of the Cross Island Parkway, good luck finding a place to park your car.

Recently I met friends in Brooklyn for dinner. After spending two hours on the Belt Parkway and exiting in Bay Ridge, I parked in a friend's driveway and was picked up by my dinner companions. We headed off to a French restaurant in Park Slope.

After an hour of circling the same blocks, we found a parking space about three inches shorter than the length of my buddy's car. He managed to squeeze it in by performing the sort of magic that I pulled off years ago when I was in top parking form. Then we only had to walk a half mile to get to our restaurant.

When we were done with our meal, we headed back to my buddy's car to find a nice long scratch along the rear bumper. Apparently the person who parked behind us didn't have that magical parking touch.

So if you're out at the supermarket and aren't fortunate enough to get a parking spot in that first aisle, suck it up and head a few aisles down -- and be happy that there's a place or two or 10 waiting for you to slip into with a single maneuver.

Reader Frank Lombardo lives in Kings Park.