Close Encounter

Last Sunday, my family and I went over to mainland to visit an old friend. After lunch we decided to be a little adventurous by going around Juru and Simpang Empat area to explore their housing projects. As we were not familiar with the road directions, we could only depend on our GPS to guide us.

While heading towards Simpang Empat township, we encountered a cross traffic lights junction. There were 2 lanes without any signboards of which lane to use if you want to turn left, go straight or turn right. As we need to go straight, hubby's instinct was to follow the left lane as right lane is usually for those wanting to turn right. But as we got nearer to the traffic lights, hubby realised that left lane is only for turning left. As we did not want to miss the directions given by our GPS, hubby took a quick shift back into the right lane. And guess what, right after the traffic lights we saw a few traffic policemen standing at the road in front waving to some cars to drive to the side of the road. And we were one of them :(.

Hubby winded down his window as a policeman approached our car. He immediately told us that we had voilated the traffic rule by jumping lanes. Hubby was quick to defend himself by saying that he didn't know that the left lane was for turning left only and there were no road signs at all. He also gave reasons that we were from Penang Island who are not familiar at all with the road situation there, but the police officer insisted that we shouldn't have shifted back to the right lane once on the left lane and demanded for hubby's driving's license. However hubby kept defending himself over the same reasons and refused to pass his license to the officer, trust me he was really good at defending with all the reasonable facts, to the extend of telling the officer why would we want to cross to Mainland to voilate traffic rules. :)
While the two of them were still debating, it suddenly occured to me that I should use the gps, which was still in my hand, as evidence. I showed him that we are relying on the GPS to guide us, how on earth would we know which lane to use, and we didn't want to turn left as we were afraid we could get lost. I guess the situation did change a little after that, instead, he asked us where we were heading to, we quickly gave him the name of the place which he doesn't know either. That's when we quickly took the opportunity to ask him to give us a 2nd chance :). He still insisted on getting hubby's license, I guess for validity checking purpose. When hubby passed it to him, he kept reminding the officer not to issue any summon :). Then the officer told us to remain in the car as he couldnt let us go yet since the lorry in front of us had also been summoned for the same voilation. After the lorry left, he came back and let us go.. phew.....
I guess Emily and Jared were also very tensed during that time as I didn;t hear them fussed at all and were totally behaved :).

What would you have done if you were us ? :)