Generally speaking, I’m very pleased with the Vanden Plas. I’ve put a few thousand miles on it and it has returned a rock steady 23 MPG — overall. On the highway it gets very close to 30 MPG.
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I took Goldie the truck up to Friday Harbor recently to pick up an elderly bandsaw to add to my growing collection of old Delta woodworking machinery. It was about as beautiful a winter day as you’ll see up here!
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My friend Don De Voe, in addition to being a motorcycle enthusiast, flies a Piper PA-14 “Family Cruiser” around the wilds of Alaska. He has kindly given me permission to post a few photos taken over the years on his adventures. The captions and other information are straight from Don.
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As much of a car fan as I am, I have absolutely no memory of this Bricklin SV-1, on display at the Ontario Science Centre in 1975. I’m standing, rather bored, to the left, aged eight, and my younger brother is taking the opportunity to sit on the display. It amuses me that no one bothered to finish the lower half of the pedestal–if this was a painting that detail would be considered cheeky commentary on the car itself. Maybe the Centre staff had a sense of humor.
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This is my father standing next to his nearly new 1956 DeSoto Fireflite. He bought the car in 1958 (when this photo was taken) as a young man of 30 in Toronto, Canada. He’s now 80, still going strong, with hardly any rust–I wonder if as much can be said of the DeSoto?
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We don’t normally get this kind of snow down here next to the sea; it was beautiful while it lasted. This photo was taken on Christmas Eve, and the snow is all-but-gone as of today.
Pre-war automobiles are fascinating. Relatively common American machines, like the Ford Model A, are still affordable and suited to the quiet roads here on the island. While I’d be happy with a Model A, I’d be really be thrilled to own something usable and British from the period, like this 1929 Austin 12/4 spotted on eBay.
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As it turns out, we did get some snow, albeit a day late. As you can see, the drifts are nearly insurmountable–we may not be able to get out of the house for weeks. (Well, OK, this is a typical Puget Sound lowlands snow, a couple of inches which, none-the-less, sends the locals into a panic.)
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Most classic car enthusiasts have fantasies of finding a rare car while poking around the countryside–perhaps a Deusenberg sitting on four flat tires in a barn, or a “fuelie” Corvette waiting to be rescued in a carport. Heck, if we’re going to dream, maybe even finding one of the factory Jaguar E-Type Lightweight race cars in a suburban garage under a pile of boxes–but who am I kidding, that’s preposterous.
What I tend to find are cars like this decaying Biscayne, discovered in the woods on a piece of property we were considering a few years ago. (Needless to say, it’s still there.) The Biscayne was the bottom-of-the-line full-size sedan in Chevrolet’s 1959 line-up, though they aren’t often seen these days for that very reason. What struck me about this car was how very complete it is, glass aside. There are a couple of minor bits of trim missing, but otherwise it looks like it was driven to its current resting place–mind you, probably about 1979!
We were promised a local blizzard and we got…nothing. This is a photo from last year when we got a few inches of snow. (The amount you see here is enough to send all of western Washington state into a panic, with such curiousities as people chaining up on bare roads, abandoned cars in the middle of slushy but otherwise OK roads, etc., etc. It really is quite amusing.)
