A Holiday-Festive Fueling Stop

A Holiday-Festive Fueling Stop

Happy Holiday Season from West Springfield, Virginia, USA …

Cardinal Plaza Shell, a gas station and automotive service shop, does up the
Holiday Season in style, with lights, Christmas trees, and other festive designs…
even Holiday Season music you can listen to on your car radio while pumping your gas.

The family run business has made a tradition of making this busy intersection
a spot to savor and manages to make the designs just a bit different each year.

Now, if Santa could just find a way to make that 1946 Chevrolet pickup truck fly, its capacious cargo bed
could accommodate more goodies than his overburdened sleigh and give those hard-working reindeer
a break while he makes his rounds through this northern Virginia suburb.

Well, maybe not the best idea after all, should they start munching on those evergreen
boughs while waiting for the old guy to return the truck and hitch them back up!

The photo was taken five Holiday Seasons ago (as might be suggested by the price for regular fuel on
the Shell sign). I’d recently acquired a fish-eye lens and late on this December night, I stopped by to
photograph the decorations without a lot of cars getting in the way. The decked out gazebo seen at left
is a regular part of the holiday displays here. Through the Christmas trees can be seen the service bays
and office/waiting room. The pump island roofing peaks through the gazebo’s decorations.

And, for devotees of vintage pickup trucks, see below for more on this one and its (postwar) era. (*)

Taken in December 2019, this is the photo’s first appearance.

©2024 Steve Ember

P.S: Cardinal Plaza Shell is a big part of why I continue to love my Big Kitty (b.2001, Coventry, England), (**) whose servicing needs are expertly seen to, and where she regularly slurps contentedly on the nozzles of the Premium pumps.

(*)