Yesterday I was very excited to welcome my first visitor from the UK. Well sort of: Shiv was overnighting between flights in Charlotte and as that’s a mere 2.5hr drive I happily volunteered to head on out there to catch up.
Unfortunately I didn’t bargain on the weather and NC cooked me up a nice winter storm to coincide with my journey. We have a lot of rain in the UK of various forms, in fact it’s pretty much a running joke that we have as many words for rain as the Inuit have for the white stuff, but I have never seen anything quite like the state of my hire car when I got to Charlotte…
… sadly this photo was taken inside a dingy multi-story car-park (and I was freezing so I wasn’t going to hang around), so it doesn’t really do the situation justice but what you’re looking at is 3/4 inch of solid ice which encapsulated the entire front of the car. The bonnet was covered in a sheet of beautiful rippled ice while the windscreen wipers were inch thick popsicles up the arms and along the blades. Beautiful but deadly… I was glad to have arrived in one piece.
Unsurprisingly, Charlotte uptown was practically deserted when we braved the weather to find some food. Despite the biting cold, the skyscrapers and sidewalks were adorned with astonishing impromptu natural ice sculptures – most impressive in the city night lights. But you’ll have to take my word for that too as it was far too cold to get snap happy!