Cruizers Car Wash

Winter here leaves road salt and sand on everything that moves, and by March a vehicle in Vernon is wearing a grey film that no amount of rain seems to shift. Cruizers Car Wash is at 4106 25 Ave out toward Okanagan Landing, the lakeside part of the city where the old steamboat port used to be and where a lot of the traffic is heading for water rather than town.

The Landing keeps its own easygoing identity apart from the rest of the city, and the vehicles out here show it. Boat trailers come off the ramps salted with lake water, trucks come back off the gravel roads that climb toward the Commonage covered in summer dust, and everything that spends August parked under trees near the beach picks up sap. A rinse before a vehicle goes back on the highway toward Kelowna, or up the hill for a ski day, is the kind of ordinary errand that gets fitted in on the way past.