When Chad came down from the tower on Friday night at the Throwdown at T-Town, he walked up to one very irate human being, and it had nothing to do with being in the lift, or being on the camera, or being hungry or thirsty. Nope, Throwdown in T-Town was a pleasure for me this year. Here’s what had transpired: the lift was parked next to bleachers, a little closer to the starting line than I have worked from in the past. I didn’t want the Angry Grandpa Chrysler to be in the way of the photographers or videographers, so I had parked it behind the set of bleachers that the lift was next to. During the evening’s events, those bleachers had plenty of fans in them. And a few of the more…um…uncouth ones had been spitting tobacco juice and snot balls behind the bleachers. Right onto an unsuspecting Chrysler’s hood and windshield. I was livid. And I had to live with that Saturday, too, because there isn’t time for a car washing when we’re on the job…viewers don’t care that my car is unwashed, they care that the video is live and that they can hear what’s going on. That’s called priorities!

But right near the hotel we were staying at was a badass car wash, so after I ran Chad to the airport and got myself together, fed, and ready to make the ten hour trek back to Bowling Green, I stopped in at IQ Car Wash. They had automatic brush washes and touch-free washes, but I wasn’t waiting in line, so into the spray stall I went. 600 miles of insect guts from a wide swath of the middle of the continental States, tobacky juice and allergy snot bombs were about to be hosed off with extreme prejudice. 

Other than me telling you that this place did the trick for everything I wanted to clean up without killing an hour or going over it all later, you don’t need a play-by-play on how a spray wash works. But can someone please tell me when car washes started going with a “desserts” theme for the chemicals used?! The bug removal spray smelled like a non-alcoholic strawberry daquiri and the look wasn’t far off from the smell, either. Given that the Tulsa area had been nice and warm for the last few days, I suddenly could’ve used a nice slushy drink. The soap-spray was the typical white sudsy foam that goes anywhere. But then I opted for the Tri-Coat deal….yeah, you’re damn skippy I’m fancy like that!…and what happened to Grampa was…

well…

I’m struggling to find the right words that I’m allowed to use on BangShift, but it did not take long for the 300C to be covered in the two sherbert-sourced Flavors of the Day foam, Spearmint and Lemon-Lime. And it smelled freaking AMAZING too! The sense of smell dramatically influences the sense of taste and certain colors appeal to the appetite, with greens being one of the big three (red and yellow being the other two.) So now I have a car covered in a substance that looks like melting sherbert to my eyes and nose.

Growing up, I washed the cars to make my allowance appear. The process was the same: pull car into the grassy area of the front yard near the hose, fill a five-gallon bucket up with water from the hose and add dish soap until I had good foam and scrub the car down until none of the Pacific Northwest grit and grime was visible. That’s it. I was washing the dished wheels on my mother’s Olds Omega instead of washing dishes and the water was a damn sight colder. As I rolled out of the car wash with a shining bright Chrysler, all I was thinking was, “Where is the nearest Baskin-Robbins?!” Yeah, make your Tide Pod jokes all you want, I was thinking of them myself…as I was enjoying my chocolate-chip mint shake on the way out of Oklahoma!