Benelux April 2013 -- Now we return to our original programming with Street Vehicles

Trout is always interested in the vehicles we see on these trips.  This is a composite of the ones that were not race cars.  We saw these on the street or while driving.

This motorcycle was waiting for us when we came out of the Franz Hals Museum in Haarlem.

 

This was someone's personal car at the race track in Zandvoort.

 

This was our rental piece of ecologically correct automotive frustration.  It is designed to die when you stop to save fuel.  It's a stick, so when you put the clutch in, it started up again.  That was a lot of fun for Trout in stop and go traffic.



 

I don't know what this car is, but it was worth a "quick, Lo, take some pictures" on the way from Bruges to Spa-Francorchamps.

 

We circled around twice to get pictures of this car on the way to Keukenhof.

 

 

This is some kind of special handicapped car that we saw in Bruges. 

 

This is upright in my saved pictures, but for the life of me, I could not get it to be right here.  Weird.  Oh well, don't hurt your neck looking at it.

 

 

Now these were a big surprise.  We saw them after the flower parade.  Fun. 

 

 

 

 

This was in the parking lot close to our B&B in Leiden.  I don't think it moved the whole time we were there.

 

Trout just had to take this picture because my scarf matched the car.

 

And I had to take these because the bike matched the car.

 

We called these vehicles "Pinocchios" in Italy.  They are very common all over Europe.  There's a little truck bed on the back.

 

Two cars in charging stations just down the street from our apartment in Amsterdam.

 

And another more attractive one across the street.

 

You can see Trout across the street on the corner supervising my picture-taking.

 

This looks at first like an ordinary sedan.  Why would Trout want a picture?  It's an OPEL!

 

 

There will be a few more cars in future postings, but these are the "special" ones.

Vehicles (Mostly Cars) in France 2012

I have enough data points now to say that it always happens.  Trout always sees cool cars when we travel in Europe.  Maybe we are guided to them automagically. 

This trip, it started early.  We encountered this one on the way from St. Sulpice to lunch on our 1st real day in Paris.  It's a Simca and we weren't the only ones interested in it.

It has a vintage license plate.

Trout also spied this Alfa parked on the street we always walked down to go to the closest Metro stop, the grocery store, some restaurants, etc.  I think it was parked there most of our week in Paris.

If you look closely or click on the picture to make it bigger, you can see a vintage plate on this car, too.

Now we're in Reims and he asked me to take a picture of this righ-hand-drive from the UK.

I think we saw it on the way to dinner our 2nd night in Reims.  When we got to the bistro, this one was parked there.

I'm not sure what kind of plates these are.  As you can see the area had lots of construction work going on.  They are remodeling the big market in the background.  It didn't seem to matter.  The place was so good, it was packed.

Why did he want me to shoot this?  Race rig, naturally.

This one is for our friend, Mike Redmond.  He has a Yaris.  This is a typical new European license plate on the continent.  Only the little letter on the left indicates that this is a French plate.

But why this one?  Maybe clicking on it will reveal that.

There are lots of small cars in Europe of course.  I liked this Ford Ka.  Are we in Boston?

These guys were parked in the lot we walked through when leaving the Le Mans race track.  Trout knew what they were right away.  More vintage plates.  Do you recognize them?

Then he wanted a picture of  these huge tires.

What were we driving all this time?  That's Trout on the left standing in front of it being distracted by the car next door.

It's a Renault Laguna, stick shift, 6 forward gears, diesel.  It's a pretty big sedan and not what we paid for.  I paid for a smaller car like a VW Golf, but when we picked it up in Reims, they had no small cars, so they were required to give us this one.  It was pretty fancy for us.

It was also new and highly electronic.  You put the key clicker in a slot.  It checked everything before it let you push the button to start it.  It told you if everything was okay on a screen.  In French.

These are more cars and some motorcycles in front of the place we stayed in Belleme near Le Mans.  All these people had been to the race.

Yeah, they do log in France.  I had more opportunities to take pictures of logging trucks in France than I did last year in the Pacific North West.

Gas stop along the autoroute, complete with fast red car.  More odd plates.  Brits?

This is a series of photos of another Trout diversion.  We noticed signs for kart tracks on many of the roads we drove in France, but we were never there at a convenient time to stop.  Trout did say that if we ever were, he wanted to stop and drive.

His opportunity came on Friday, June 22nd on a back road on the way to the Cote d'Azur.  We saw a sign for this place and the open-gated entrance to our left with some railroad tracks between the road we were driving on and it.

We figured out how to get to that side road and were happy to see that the place was actually open for business.  We were a bit early (more about that later) but Trout paid for 2 sessions on the track.

The guys there spoke no English, so they had this woman who translated for Trout.  I'm sure they get lots of English speakers there.

He had a great time driving around the track.  There was much more track than we could see from the paddock area.  He also said that the kart was much more powerful than any he'd ever driven in the US.

This is on the back side of the office.

While Trout was going around, this guy in the driving suit showed up with his own kart.  After Trout was done, we watched him go much faster around the track.  When I passed him once, I said hello in English and he responded with "how's it going?"  So I thought he spoke English. 

When he came in Trout decided to go talk to him.  It turned out that he didn't speak that much English, but Mr. Walk and Talk did get to see the kart and the cool trailer he used to transport it.

There will be many more vehicles in my driving pictures, but these were the ones Trout particularly noticed when I had a camera in hand to take pictures.