too cold for a car wash?

on tuesday, i drove through a damn blizzard trying to get home from my holiday fun in michigan and my new year's festivities in cincinnati.

i'm a michigan kid, born and bred, so i know my way around a highway full of snow, y'all. (or up there, we call them expressways, guys). but honestly, this was the scariest lot of driving i had ever done. i hit the tennessee border and went through jellico, and once i was in it, it was like something from mad max and the thunderdome or some other post-apocalyptic haze. i mean: once you are in it, you are in it.

i've got driving smarts, thanks to my dad, and oddly enough this prone-to-panic-attacks girly can keep her cool in a bad road situation. but at one point i had tears in my eyes, hoping i wouldnt plummet off the cliff or that a truck in front of me wouldnt back slide into me, thus ending my chances for any sort of 2008 at all. (what a great way to ring in the new year! yay!) it was pandemonium; cars were sliding off the road; trucks were oscillating back and forth trying to get enough momentum to go forward and up on the slippery road to hell. (i have a friend/acquaintance who drives a truck, and i tell you damn straight: that shit gotta be hard!). poor drivers just had to bring it to a stop dead in the middle of the road so they could get the tire chains situated. and after a few minutes of the most frightening driving of my life, we. all. came. to. a. complete. stop.

and stayed like that for 2 hours.

it was new year's day, so all the radio broadcasts werent live, and i couldnt get any sort of report at all. when the man in front of me got out of his suv, i got out to ask if he had heard anything. nope. so my guess is that they shut us down in order that the appropriate government vehicles could get ahead of us and clear and salt the roads.

two hours later, i was on my slow but steady, albeit somewhat still dangerous trek home. and salt the roads they did! because my poor little piece of shit saturn is covered, covered, in salt.

and here's the thing. last i checked, it was 42 degrees in knoxville, and the car washes are closed because "it's too cold." are you shitting me?! car washes in michigan stay open year round, and it's not 42 degrees there right now.

oh, the south; oh, knoxville.