Very glad to live where I do!

The fantastic weather has continued in our region and the blue skies seem to make living here even more enjoyable.  Our neighbour, who has a grass airstrip on his property, has been flying his superb biplane ultralight a lot and as his final approach goes basically straight over our cottage we enjoy seeing him pass quite low over us.  He is obviously having a lot of fun!  Unfortunately no pictures, as I am notoriously bad at taking photos of aircraft in flight!

Today I joined a good friend in a fun car run around our district in his Citroën Light 15.  It is a magnificent car and we drove somewhere in the region of 100ks effortlessly over quiet back roads.  Old car owners are seemingly always looking for 'parts' and old wrecks in sheds etc, and today, lo and behold, we found an amazing stash of old cars, mostly American and a few British, but unfortunately no French.

I was particularly impressed with this 'ute'.  I still harbor a dream to own one of these early 40s Chevs, but perhaps to upgrade the mechanical bits to make it more useable.  Typically one of these would have a wooden or metal tray back, but this 42 model is a genuine 'ute', or coupe utility as they were formally named, which I'm sure is quite rare.  Ford Australia invented the 'ute' in 1934, whereby the open rear portion sides were a continuation of the cab, rather than an added 'box'.  Other Australian manufacturers followed suit, and obviously the idea caught on over in the US too, but it was we Aussies who invented the concept.  This one was definitely not for sale, however!

There was also a graveyard of other 'projects', the likes of which are becoming harder to find.  I'm sure eventually all this will become available, perhaps by auction, though it seems unlikely that some of the cars will be saved as they were pretty far gone.

Anyway, it was great fun looking around!  In my earlier years I was, or at least I thought I was, very keen on car restoration, but I soon discovered that I neither had the time or the skills to do it properly.  In those days I would have jumped at the chance to rescue and rebuild any of these cars, but not now.  I certainly admire people who can take on these 'heroic' restorations and return them to life though!  For the time being I'll be sticking to collecting model cars as a side to the trains.  I have gathered together all my French model cars of 1:43 scale from assorted storage boxes and have displayed them in the entry area of my Trainbarn.  It was really fun getting them all together in one place, but it was even more fun finding them! 

Good weather, good times and good friends!