On December 22, after breakfast, Li Long dropped Mingming and Haohao off at elementary school and drove onto the Wuyi Highway. He planned to visit Dushanzi Petrochemical that day to check out the market.
Two days after the freezing rain ended, the road surface had changed noticeably. It was still slippery, but both the traffic authorities and road maintenance crews had treated it, so driving no longer required quite the caution it had immediately after the freezing rain.
There was plenty of traffic on the highway. Though it was winter, the heavy trucks were still busy. Li Long saw a lot of coal trucks and freight trucks. Owning a truck and hauling freight was still a fairly profitable business these days.
Of the trucks Liu Gaolou brought over from Kazakhstan and left with Li Long to sell, apart from the four Li Long kept, the rest usually sold within two weeks of arriving. Someone in the city had set up a transport company and bought five trucks in one go, quite a substantial purchase.
There were also plenty of cars, mostly Santanas and Xialis, with Xialis somewhat more common. All the way from the county town to the Three-Way Junction linking Dushanzi, Kui City, and Wusu, Li Long never saw another Land Cruiser like his. There really were not many of them around.
It was his first visit to Dushanzi Petrochemical. Having never been there, he could only drive around looking for the main gate. Fortunately, the company's tall smokestacks were conspicuous, as were the facilities that looked enormous even from a distance. After circling twice, he found it easily enough.
When he pulled up to the gate, a guard came over, asked him to lower his window, and asked what he wanted. Li Long said directly that he wanted