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I don’t think we’ve had a drop of anything other than sunshine for weeks. No rain, not even a serious sprinkle I can recall. So I decided to wash my car yesterday. You know, a real hand wash, with a hose and rags and Windex and paper towels and everything. These days I’m driving that nice PT Cruiser convertible, as you might remember. A sweet cobalt blue with a black top. I even have Sirius satellite radio. I love it. So there I was, down crawling around the wheels on a bright Sunday afternoon. My car wasn’t all that dirty, mind you, but a good buff and polish seemed just the thing to make it sparkle. And that got me thinking about how our great weather here tends to keep our cars a lot prettier than automobiles up north. My car is a 2006 and it looks pretty much brand new. When I lived in places like Vermont and Michigan, a two year-old car already was starting to looked a tad – well, weathered.
True, our air is seasoned with sea salt down here and if you live near the ocean, as I do, the briny breeze can have some corrosive effects. But that’s nothing compared to four months of road salt each year, combined with slush and mud and sleet and generally cruddy weather much of the time. Anyone who’s ever lived both up there and down here will tell you the same thing: cars down here look a lot better.
When I was a teenager growing up in Michigan, I used to hear stories about local folks who would fly down to the Sunshine State for a used car. Everyone called these automobiles simply, “Florida cars.” And everyone understood this meant used cars that looked like new cars. For all I know northerners still may come down here for used cars. We have our share of old clunkers on the South Florida roads, of course, just like anywhere else in the country. I was driving one myself not that long ago, partly because it lasted so long in our endless summer. But when you look around on I-95 or somewhere, you usually see a whole lot of nice-looking, non-rusty cars. Lots of very pricey cars too, like Ferraris and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. It’s all just part of the experience of living or visiting here. So yes, my PT is one of those sharp-looking vehicles right now. I put a good hour into washing my car on Sunday afternoon and proudly drove it all over the place. Then Sunday night I caught the local weatherman’s forecast: “Tomorrow we may have just a very brief shower, but then it will be beautiful the whole rest of the week!” Of course. If it rains at all, I'm sure it will rain directly over Dania Beach where I live. Just enough to spot up the windows and leave little smudges on the paint. If you get caught in this little storm, all I can say is I’m sorry.
True, our air is seasoned with sea salt down here and if you live near the ocean, as I do, the briny breeze can have some corrosive effects. But that’s nothing compared to four months of road salt each year, combined with slush and mud and sleet and generally cruddy weather much of the time. Anyone who’s ever lived both up there and down here will tell you the same thing: cars down here look a lot better.
When I was a teenager growing up in Michigan, I used to hear stories about local folks who would fly down to the Sunshine State for a used car. Everyone called these automobiles simply, “Florida cars.” And everyone understood this meant used cars that looked like new cars. For all I know northerners still may come down here for used cars. We have our share of old clunkers on the South Florida roads, of course, just like anywhere else in the country. I was driving one myself not that long ago, partly because it lasted so long in our endless summer. But when you look around on I-95 or somewhere, you usually see a whole lot of nice-looking, non-rusty cars. Lots of very pricey cars too, like Ferraris and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. It’s all just part of the experience of living or visiting here. So yes, my PT is one of those sharp-looking vehicles right now. I put a good hour into washing my car on Sunday afternoon and proudly drove it all over the place. Then Sunday night I caught the local weatherman’s forecast: “Tomorrow we may have just a very brief shower, but then it will be beautiful the whole rest of the week!” Of course. If it rains at all, I'm sure it will rain directly over Dania Beach where I live. Just enough to spot up the windows and leave little smudges on the paint. If you get caught in this little storm, all I can say is I’m sorry.
posted by LauderBLOGGER at 3:07 PM
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