I am currently on a trip visiting friends and family. On Saturday my travels took me past these two Volkswagen vans. Yeah, they look a bit forlorn. What’s interesting about this (at least to me) is that these two vans have been sitting in this exact same location just east of Morristown, Tennessee since at least 1983, which is when I first saw them! For years I have been meaning to stop and snap some pictures, and this year I finally made it happen.
It’s hard to say why they are still sitting here, or to know just how much longer they will remain there. All I know is that this is just one more thing that brings back fond memories of childhood roadtrips.
A little rubbing compound and these things should be good to go. Not sure about the windshield.
The house appears to be kept up. The yard appears to be kept up, yet the owners of the property are oblivious to what is in front. Maybe they see it as a form of abstract art. Will they still be there in 30 more years? I almost hope they will.
No one has seen those kids since they broke down on the way to the concert and went to the house up on the hill looking for a phone……..
In the industrial section of the town where I grew up, there was a fenced in area with a few old cars and cabin cruisers from a bygone area. As a boy, I stood by the fence and spotted a black 1949-early 50’s Cadillac sedan. I dreamed of owning it, then. As the years passed, I’d see the car, still sitting there among the other debris. I’d say that car was there till the early 1990’s.
I must have passed that place hundreds of times in my car, always looking for it like an old friend. Then one day it was gone. I felt a little sad, but hoped someone bought it and would restore it.
There’s a ’48 Caddy that’s been sitting on a relatively busy street in South Pasadena, CA for at least two years (since I started driving that way to work) and probably longer. Once in a great while I’ll see that it has moved (officially, overnight parking is illegal in South Pas, but I’ve never seen it get a ticket). I hope to see it go somewhere to be restored, not scrapped.
He’s willing to let them go for just $8K each.
Somehow I’m reminded of Fry’s found VW Bus from Futurama.
“you clean out the dead bodies and you can have it”
“Yeah, yeah…I’ve bought used cars before….”
This summer I came across a ’59 VW Transporter on a trailer. I took some shots of it, and the owner had me email him some of the photos. He plans on restoring it, and I guess he wanted them for before and after shots. Considering that the plates expired in 1977, it was in pretty solid shape for something that survived all those Ontario winters.
Looks like a scene out of rural Upstate New York.
Wonder if anyone drives by them and dream of redoing one…not realizing it’d be much less expensive to simply go West and find one with a good body.
Hey, these are both daily drivers!
They will probably disappear now. I wrote something on a couple 59 tbirds that had been in the same place for years. Within about two months of publishing the story they had both disappeared.
Interesting, t hey look like they broke down or some such, and they just sat there with someone just taking probably a weed whacker to the grass/weeds and let them simply rot.
Notice how the more rusted one has it’s slider falling down off the car.
Scrap price must be pretty low around there !!!!!!!!!!!
Or if they were the eariler Splitties they would not still be there, people pay silly money for those even in this condition.
Years ago I saw a pair of VW Kombi bus side panels mounted on a set of gates at a sculpture park in the middle of the South Australian desert.
When I was a kid, my family would travel several times each summer from the Worcester, MA area to Cape Cod. We used to go past a car repair place in Grafton, MA that had a pre-1968 VW Transporter Pickup. It was in good shape and IIRC it had the name of the repair shop painted on the side; I can’t remember if it had license plates on it but I think it did. It stuck out to me because I so rarely saw a VW Pickup. I remember seeing it for a number of years in the ’70s and ’80s (I was born in 1970 and took this trip regularly from the time I was an infant until the late 1980s). I can’t remember exactly when it disappeared, but every time I drive by that location, I think of that old VW Pickup.
How many of us have stories like this? I remember seeing a green 65 Holden panel van parked in a yard for at least 10 years until recently.
Lincoln 1959 Mark IV was rotting in my Brother in laws back yard, I dreamed of driving that.
Another family had their previous Imperials in Their long driveway in all disrepair.Us kids spent many hours in those, sometimes the Power Windows Would work out of the blue I remember. I mean they had batteries but Without a key, and The Lighters would work.
So that’s what happened to the Mystery Machine after Scooby Doo went off the air…
Tennessee???
Hard to reckon how many different families lived in them once portable shanties and how many younguns arrived on Earth from the activities within them thar shanties.