These six parking lots will ruin your holiday spirit
I love holiday time. It’s tinted with romance and nostalgia and the highly irrational hope for a merry and bright Southern snowfall. I love making my holiday shopping list, I love checking things off. I love turning on my seat heaters and my Josh Groban holiday music and gliding my Elantra down the street like Santa’s sleigh (So cheerful! So joyous!) until the moment I turn into a shopping center.
These six parking lots obliterate my holiday spirit:
(1) Kenilworth Commons
My heart turns to coal the second I shut my car door and start walking toward the Harris Teeter because I can hear a volunteer jangling the bell for Salvation Army donations.
“Please realize I’ve already made a holiday donation and I’m not a terrible person,” I plead in my brain as I avert eye contact and swerve to the left and nearly get run over by someone desperate to get to Duck Donuts or Foxcroft Wine Co. or Bank of America or an illicit Bakersfield parking spot. There are too many options for this tiny lot.
It's #GivingTuesday! When you donate to @SalvationArmyUS, the money stays in your community: https://t.co/oWRRmxD1SN pic.twitter.com/R8zYt066Wb
— Nick Cannon (@NickCannon) December 1, 2015
(2) StoneCrest at Piper Glen
The worst thing happens when it’s time to make your great escape with your holiday loot. Suddenly everyone conveniently forgets how to operate at a four-way stop and plows through each one like there is no tomorrow. Then you try to sidle your way into one of the lanes at the light leading onto Rea Road but the other drivers are ignoring your frantic, friendly waves and won’t let you in and you lose all faith in humanity.
(3) Cotswold Village
It now takes a heart-palpitation-inducing 10 minutes to snake through this gridlock of holiday shoppers alternately jolting forward and jamming on their breaks. Then there are those select drivers who sit with their blinkers on waiting for someone to back out with the patience of ninjas.
(Sound familiar? Yeah, we’ve ranted about this parking lot before.)
(4) The Arboretum
No one understands traffic patterns in this shopping center either. Those giant white arrows indicating lawful direction are clearly just too much to be bothered with and no one seems to understand what their brakes were made for. Also, who thought to put a CATS bus stop in the middle of the traffic flow?
(5) Park Road Shopping Center
The parallel parking option here complicates everything because half of the people attempting the maneuver can’t actually do it. Then there’s the aggressive game of chicken going on between pedestrians and drivers near the random stop sign by Caribou Coffee that everyone ignores. You’re better off staying home and mixing up some hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps.
(6) SouthPark Mall
No.
Photos: Katie Toussaint; Charlotte Observer file
This story was originally published December 7, 2015 at 11:00 PM with the headline "These six parking lots will ruin your holiday spirit."