AUGUST 7, 2011: IN SEARCH OF COLLECTOR CARS ON THE ROAD IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES

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A family wedding was a good reason for a road trip through the Canadian Rockies.

 

We thought that photos of vintage iron driving through the Rockies would be a great shoot for our website.

 

The mountains did their part-they showed up, but the cars and trucks were nowhere to be seen on the road. OK, truth be told, we did see one 1969 Chevelle trailer queen riding majestically on its four-wheeled throne.

 

But that is a little light on the excitement meter.

 

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The Trans Canada Highway runs right through the Canadian Rockies and provides the most interesting segment of a drive across a big country. These days, it is a little less twisty and turn through the Rogers Pass section of the journey, but it is still an incredible road.

 

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Surprisingly, its biggest drawback is the large volume of traffic through the Rockies and maybe that scared off the old car guys.

 

Whatever the reason, we saw little evidence of blasts from the past on the mountain highway. We don’t count trailer queens in our car census.

 

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Eventually we arrived in the interior of British Columbia, an area of smaller mountains and higher temperatures. It is closer to a desert environment and it provides a warm and dry retirement home for old iron.

 

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Most of the vehicles are resting comfortably in the front and back yards of local residents, seemingly free from the burden of actual road time.

 

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One yard caught our attention enough to turn around and drive back into the guy’s yard. It resembled an old guard wrecker’s yard and it turned out that was part of the plan.

 

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The owner was a friendly enough guy, and he steered us indoors, even though we were more interested in the old iron in his front yard.

 

We have no trouble assembling content for every section of our website-save one: we have trouble finding bush and field cars for our Fallen Stars section.

 

Some of you may not realize that our site is essentially a large e-magazine, complete with several sections. It is a lot of work, but we are very proud of our results.

 

So our encounter with the guy with a yard full of old rides was a great opportunity to enhance our supply of valuable old- iron- in- need- of- repair- photos… Fallen Stars from the past.

 

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Seemingly, all was good with the world until the guy steered us into his indoor museum of restored vehicles. He put on a Beach Boys song through a tinny speaker acoustically similar to an old drive-in speaker that hung on the car window.

 

I looked around the room and tried to connect the dots between the song and his cars from the Big Band era. I did, however, connect the dots on one thing: this guy was about to relieve us of ten bucks apiece to shoot his old cars out front.

 

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Somehow this concept evaded my brother Jerry. Maybe he has a few molecules of plucky optimism left in his system because he was very surprised at the fee. Not me, as soon as I heard the Beach Boys.

 

Anyhow, we were not interested in the indoor car show that fell well short of every other museum I have visited, but we paid the guy. He claimed that he was a non-profit business but failed to provide a receipt for our records, and I choose to believe that those bills were not 2 seconds away from his shirt pocket.

 

He was not amenable to a shout-out on our site in exchange for a photo-op in his front yard, even though we rank between 1 and 4 on page one under “collector cars” in a Google Canada search.

 

Yet he commiserated about the fact that nobody knew of his existence. Newsflash here buddy, they still won’t via our website.You get to bask in obscurity because…

 

You fall well short of visionary in the big picture department.

 

Jim Sutherland

Here’s a link to some great old iron and old iron related stuff…no admission charge-https://www.mystarcollectorcar.com/

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