Saturday, August 8, 2009

Car Show in Limoux

We thought it might be interesting to see the old car show in Limoux today, and so it was. There weren't as many cars as the Moab April Action Car Show, but it was special in it's own way. There was this Citroen CV that someone had altered to have a little more storage space. I can't imagine that it came off the production line this way. It had a "S" on the rear, perhaps to indicate that it was registered in Sweden.


And, it had a great sticker which I hadn't seen before. I translate it into American this way. "This is not a car...this is a way of life." Or perhaps "...this is the art of life."

Great old motorcycles were here and there. I had not ever heard of the manufacturers and therefore cannot remember who made this specimen. In any case, it needed a little work and a new back tire.


Another Citroen CV was there, and this one, inexpliciably, was not in the car show, but just sitting in the parking lot. Please click on it to enlarge it so that you can see the tea cup and saucer on the hood, and the little farm animals grazing there as well. "Deuchiste"? Makes no sense to me. Can you make sense of the word? It is numbered 007, like any spy would be caught dead in a car this conspicuous.

And there were several classic old cars in remarkable shape, like the Le Zebre Type C Phaeton from 1914, made by Solomon and Lamy, that had 4 cylinders and could attain a top speed of 60 km/hr. Whee! Monsieur Solomon eventually went to work for Citroen but no mention of Monsieur Lamy.
This is a Zedel from the 30's. I have never heard of a Zedel either, have you? Anyway, the car show was smaller than I expected for reasons I cannot fathom. The April car show in Moab has 400 to 500 cars, coming from Utah, Colorado and all over the western half of the US. See http://northofandorra.blogspot.com/2008/04/april-action-car-show.html This show had 30 or 40 decent cars and a few clunkers. Are old cars harder to come by in Europe because of some economic or geographic cause? Are there fewer old car nuts in France? I can certainly imagine that the US might have the world's largest supply of cars and car nuts, and therefore....car shows. Do the old car shows in other parts of France, like Paris, blow your socks off? I don't know. Your thoughts?

2 comments:

Harley said...

I seem to recall that "Deuchiste" refers to avid fans of the Citroen 2CV.
Do you think that World War II affected the number of available old cars for people to be nutty about?
BTW, you folks are doing a fabulous job of coming up with new and interesting topics and photos for this blog!

Anonymous said...

I agree with Harley...I think a lot of old cars were destroyed by WW2...between the Nazis and subsequent "carpet-bombing" by the Allies...a lot of cars may not have had much of a chance to survive to old age!

Luke